The Supreme Court, the Census Case and the Truth by Linda Greenhouse
Last edited Thu May 9, 2019, 12:21 PM - Edit history (2)
'Will the justices be the administration’s enablers or form a firewall against its lies?
The smart money says the Trump administration is going to prevail at the Supreme Court in its effort to add a citizenship question to next year’s census. Having read the transcript and listened to the audio file of the recent argument, I don’t challenge that forecast.
Neither am I going to argue with the experts’ prediction that adding the citizenship question, which has been omitted since 1950 from the census form that goes to every household, will lead immigrant families to fail to return the form out of fear caused by the Trump administration's brutal anti-immigrant policies. The resulting differential undercount will penalize immigrant-rich cities and states in political representation and federal funding.
Harmful as that impact would be on the affected areas, I want to argue here that validating the Trump administration’s cynical hijacking of the census would have a devastating effect on the integrity of the Supreme Court.
Never mind that three Federal District Courts, ruling since the first of the year in three cases, have found the addition of the citizenship question to be procedurally improper or flat-out unconstitutional. There are respectable contrary arguments that might be made, under the Administrative Procedure Act or the Constitution’s Enumeration Clause, or there would be, had the administration acted in the good faith that Judge Jesse Furman, ruling in the case now before the court, found to be conspicuously lacking. . .
And what is there to say about Solicitor General Noel Francisco’s argument for the Trump administration? It’s part of our current national tragedy that an allergy to the truth has infected the Department of Justice from the top down. Mr. Francisco maintained in both his brief and his oral argument that it was the Justice Department that urged Wilbur Ross, the secretary of commerce, to add the citizenship question, ostensibly to provide for more precise enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. Aside from the fact that the Trump administration has shown no interest in protecting voting rights and that no administration has asked for a citizenship question in the 54 years since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 became law, there is one problem with the solicitor general’s narrative: It is demonstrably untrue.
According to the record methodically compiled in Judge Furman’s District Court courtroom, Secretary Ross was urged to add the citizenship question by Steve Bannon, a White House adviser at the time, and the anti-immigrant crusader Kris Kobach. Mr. Ross shopped the idea around the federal government for a year and was initially turned down by the Department of Homeland Security as well as the Justice Department. He finally made a direct pitch to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who agreed to get him a letter that would request the citizenship question and provide the Voting Rights Act rationale — the rationale that Judge Furman called pretextual.
So when Mr. Francisco told the justices that there was “no evidence in this record” that Secretary Ross would have added the citizenship question “had the Department of Justice not requested it,” he was at that moment the luckiest person in the courtroom: The red light on the lectern came on, indicating the end of his argument time. No one could ask a follow-up question, including Justice Kagan, who earlier had observed to Mr. Francisco that “you can’t read this record without sensing that this need is a contrived one.”'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/opinion/supreme-court-census-trump.html?
= new reply since forum marked as read
constituting a pretext; dubious or spurious.
Example.."we will show that other arguments that officials have made are plainly pretextual"
denoting or relating to a minor offense that enables authorities to detain a suspect for investigation of other matters.
Example.."Ashcroft has justified the use of transparently pretextual charges to hold them"
I concur with Judge Furman...
