census citizenship question supreme court case

What was provided here was more of a distraction.”, Justice Clarence Thomas filed an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part, which was joined by Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. Available for everyone, funded by readers. But this theory isn’t just speculation, Roberts concluded: It “relies instead on the predictable effect of Government action on the decisions of third parties” and is therefore enough to allow the challengers to sue. The government appealed directly to the Supreme Court, urging the justices to take up the case immediately – without requiring the government to first seek relief from a federal appeals court. Justice Samuel Alito also filed an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part. Judge Jesse Furman ruled that, in deciding to include a question about citizenship, Ross had committed a “smorgasbord of classic, clear-cut violations” of the federal law governing administrative agencies. Reasoned decision-making under the Administrative Procedure Act calls for an explanation for agency action. Whether the decision bears a “reasonable relationship” to getting an accurate headcount isn’t the right question to ask here, Roberts reasoned. “This is just one milestone on a much longer path to an accurate 2020 census,” said Sean Rankin, executive director of the Democratic Attorneys General Association, whose members helped take on the Trump administration in the case. (18-540), Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg awarded Liberty Medal. Full Calendar They maintained that, even if Ross’ decision to add the citizenship question wasn’t pretextual, it still violated the federal laws governing administrative agencies because he decided to ask the question even though all of the evidence “indicated that asking the question would produce citizenship data that is less accurate, not more.” His failure to consider what Breyer characterized as “a severe risk of harmful consequences” “risked undermining public confidence in the integrity of our democratic system itself,” Breyer wrote. On Tuesday, the court released orders from the October 9 conference. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can leave if you wish. The Trump administration will not be able to move ahead with its original, highly controversial plan to include a question about citizenship on the 2020 US census, after the supreme court … By Ariane de Vogue, CNN Supreme Court Reporter, Updated 0230 GMT (1030 HKT) October 10, 2018. On Monday, the court was closed for Columbus Day. "Absent a stay, these high-level Executive Branch officials will be forced to prepare for and attend these depositions, and those harms cannot be undone by an eventual victory on the merits," Francisco wrote. The census is designed to count every person living in the country, not just citizens, and it is used in consequential decisions ranging from federal infrastructure spending to the number of seats each state holds in Congress. Stephanie Hofeller had shared the hard drives with the North Carolina chapter of the watchdog group Common Cause, which is involved in a partisan-gerrymandering case in that state, after she called the group seeking a recommendation for a lawyer for her mother. The ruling represented a setback for the president – though perhaps only a temporary one. The challengers contended that including a question about citizenship on the census will lead to inaccurate results, because households with undocumented or Hispanic immigrants won’t respond. The court’s other conservative justices – Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh – joined the third part of the Roberts opinion, in which the court concluded that the decision to add the citizenship question did not run afoul of the enumeration clause. Assn. Submit Event, On Thursday, Sept. 17, the National Constitution Center awarded its Liberty Medal to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a program featuring performances by internationally renowned opera singers and tributes from special guests. This should have been an easy case, and in the end, it was.”. Federal Election Comm’n, 554 U. S. 724, 733.The District Court con-cluded that the evidence at trial established a sufficient likelihood that reinstating a citizenship question would result in noncitizen households responding to the census at lower rates than other The award “honors men and women of courage and conviction who strive to secure the blessings of liberty to people around the globe.” […]. Awarded the Webby Award for excellence on the internet. Posted in Department of Commerce v. New York, Featured, Merits Cases, Recommended Citation: Click here to follow...(click to view)Click here to follow along with our symposium on the jurisprudence of Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett.Click here for impor...(click to view)Click here for important resources on Barrett's nomination and the confirmation process. The court acknowledged that the Secretary of Commerce has significant latitude in formulating the questionnaire, but it emphasized that his discretion was not “unbounded.” The census is not a subject that has been “traditionally committed” to the discretion of the agency in charge; indeed, the court noted, courts have previously reviewed several challenges arising from decisions relating to the census. Democrats point to internal documents and public statements by Ross as evidence that he was interested in including the question long before the Justice Department officially asked for the question in order to assist with enforcement of voting laws. And that, they argued, could lead states with large immigrant populations – which tend to lean Democratic – to lose billions in federal funding and possible even seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. The addition came after a federal judge in California ruled that the use of the citizenship question also violates the “enumeration clause”; the government wanted to avoid a scenario in which it prevailed in the Supreme Court but was nonetheless prohibited from including the citizenship question by a different lower-court ruling on an issue that the Supreme Court hadn’t addressed. Opinion analysis: Court orders do-over on citizenship question in census case (Updated), Multiple experts have voiced concerns that the citizenship question would lead undocumented people to avoid replying. The challengers argued that if the Trump administration actually wanted to add the citizenship question to give an advantage to whites and Republicans, that would be “the diametric opposite” of what the administration has maintained throughout this lawsuit. Such an undercount, which would mostly affect minority immigrant communities, could benefit Republicans at the ballot box, according to political research unearthed during the case. The district court had also ruled that Ross’ rationale for including the citizenship question – that the Department of Justice had asked for the data to better enforce federal voting-rights laws – was a pretext for its actual reasoning, and here Roberts, in an opinion joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, agreed. It was no surprise that Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court in the case – both because of the magnitude of the ruling and because he had not yet written an opinion for April, when the case was argued. In a letter from New York Solicitor General Barbara Underwood, they urged the justices to deny what they characterized as the government’s “extraordinary request” to decide the discrimination question now. Although the Trump administration had hoped that the Supreme Court would clear the way for it to include such a question, the justices instead sent the issue back to the Department of Commerce. The Department of Justice did not tip its hand about its possible next steps. He “put the point bluntly,” writing that the federal judiciary has “no authority to stick its nose into the question whether it is good policy to include a citizenship question on the census or whether the reasons given by Secretary Ross for that decision were his only reasons or his real reasons.”. The fate of a question about citizenship on the 2020 census remains up in the air today. The justices rejected the government’s argument that such losses are too hypothetical, because they would only happen if those households choose not to comply with the legal duty to return their census questionnaires out of fear that the information will be used against them – which, the government says, is not its fault. In a deeply fractured opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s four liberal justices in ruling that the justification that the government offered at the time for including the citizenship question was just a pretext. Thomas warned that the court’s holding could have much broader implications for administrative law because it “reflects an unprecedented departure” from the court’s normal practice of deferring to discretionary decisions by federal agencies. Lower courts found Ross had violated both the Census Act and the Administrative Procedures Act in his handling of the affair. The government had addressed this issue in its brief in the Supreme Court, Solicitor General Noel Francisco stressed. Awarded the Silver Gavel Award by the American Bar Association for fostering the American public’s understanding of the law and the legal system. Click here to follow along with our symposium on the jurisprudence of Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett. The government came to the Supreme Court for the first time last fall, asking the justices to block the depositions of Ross and John Gore, a senior official in the Department of Justice, and to bar the district court from allowing additional fact-finding outside the official record for the decision. But the high court said that in this case, the stated reason by the commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, for including the citizenship question – to obtain better data to enforce the Voting Rights Act, the civil rights-era legislation against voter discrimination – was not credible. Although most cases are quiet after oral argument, the oral argument in this one was followed by a series of events worthy of a made-for-TV movie. Instead, Roberts noted, the court should look at the history of the census, and that history shows that all “three branches of Government have understood the Constitution to allow Congress, and by extension the Secretary, to use the census for more than simply counting the population,” and specifically for “information-gathering purposes.” Therefore, Roberts concluded, the enumeration clause “permits Congress, and by extension the Secretary, to inquire about citizenship on the census questionnaire.”. The justices granted the government’s request in February. CNN's Gregory Wallace contributed to this report. And it was also reasonable for him to decide that it would be worth it to include the citizenship question even though that might result in a lower response rate from households with residents who are not U.S. citizens, Roberts suggested – particularly because Ross believed that the risk of a lower response rate was “difficult to assess.”, Roberts and his conservative colleagues also reversed the district court’s ruling that Ross’ decision violated provisions of the Census Act that require the Secretary of Commerce to use administrative records, rather than questions on the census, whenever possible and to inform Congress about his plans for the census. But recently discovered files have compelled lower courts to re-examine the case.

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