CENSUS STILL IN FLUX
Supreme Court says it’s too soon to rule on Trump’s census plan.
WASHINGTON — A divided Supreme Court has dismissed as premature a challenge to President Donald Trump’s plan to exclude people living in the country illegally from the population count used to allot states seats in the House of Representatives.
The court’s decision Friday, led by its conservative justices, is not a final ruling on the matter. While it allows Mr. Trump to pursue the plan for now, it’s not clear whether he will receive final numbers from the Census Bureau before he leaves office next month.
If the president still has not received final census numbers by the time Joe Biden takes office Jan. 20, Mr. Trump’s plan will be effectively dead because Mr. Biden is extremely unlikely to pursue it. It’s also possible the Biden administration would take steps to try to reverse decisions made under Mr. Trump.
For now, though, the high court said it was too soon to rule on the legality of Mr. Trump’s plan because it’s not yet clear how many people he would seek to exclude and whether the division of House seats would be affected.
The court, in an unsigned opinion said: “We express no view on the merits of the constitutional and related statutory claims presented. We hold only that they are not suitable for adjudication at this time.” At least five of the court’s six
conservative justices had to join the opinion to make a majority on the nine-member court.
The three liberal justices dissented, saying the effort to exclude people in the country from the population for divvying up House seats is unlawful.
“I believe this Court should say so,” Justice Stephen Breyer wrote, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.
It’s not clear that Friday’s decision will have much
practical effect. Documents leaked to the House committee that oversees the Census Bureau suggest the apportionment numbers won’t be ready until after Jan. 20, when Mr. Trump leaves office and Mr. Biden becomes president. The Census Bureau has acknowledged the discovery of data irregularities in recent weeks that put the Dec. 31 deadline in federal law for transmitting numbers to the president in jeopardy.
Dale Ho, the American
Civil Liberties Union lawyer who argued the case for the challengers, said the decision was about the timing of the case, not whether the plan complies with federal law.
“This ruling does not authorize President Trump’s goal of excluding undocumented immigrants from the census count used to apportion the House of Representatives. The legal mandate is clear: Every single person counts in the census, and every single person is
represented in Congress. If this policy is ever actually implemented, we’ll be right back in court challenging it,” Mr. Ho said.
No president has tried to do what Mr. Trump outlined in a memo in July: to remove millions of noncitizens from the once-a-decade head count of the U.S. population, which determines how many seats each state gets in the House of Representatives and the allocation of some federal funding.