White nationalism lost in federal court yesterday.
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Judge Jesse Furman blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to add a question to the 2020 census asking about citizenship status. Furman “found that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross violated federal law by misleading the public — and his own department — about the reasons for adding the question,” Dara Lind of Vox writes.
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Ross claimed, laughably, that the citizenship question would help the Trump administration enforce voting rights. In truth, it was designed to intimidate Latinos — both legal and illegal — into not responding to the census. The resulting undercount would then reduce the political representation of immigrant-heavy regions and cause them to receive less federal funding.
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The citizenship question, Paul Waldman writes in The Washington Post, is part of “a broader effort on the part of Republicans to put a thumb on the electoral scale in every way they possibly can, whether it’s extreme gerrymandering, voter suppression efforts targeted at minorities, or the use of the census to make Republican victories just that much more likely.”
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Yesterday’s ruling isn’t the final word. The Trump administration will likely appeal, and the appeal will likely reach the Supreme Court, where Republican-appointed justices hold a five-to-four majority.
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But there is some reason to hope the justices will avoid an obviously partisan decision. Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, the two newest conservative justices, have previously taken a dim view of federal officials who exceed limits on their power, The Daily Beast’s Jay Michaelson explains. “While it’s always possible that the Court’s conservatives will vote ideology over principle … their particular judicial philosophies do not bode well for the Trump administration’s brazen defiance of administrative law,” Michaelson writes.
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A side note: Given the combination of his census exploits, his lies about those exploits and his shady stock trades, Ross may now deserve consideration if my colleague Gail Collins revisits her analysis of the worst Trump Cabinet member. His case is helped by the fact that some of his even more corrupt colleagues have recently departed the administration.
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Seems to me that the Government attorneys representing liars like Ross and his dishonest positions in court are violating ethical rules. Why would a case like this be on the way to the Supremes, rather than Ross being on his way to jail for conspiring to violate civl rights? And, as Leonhardt points out, some of his departed Cabinet colleagues were even more corrupt and dishonest.
PWS
01-16-19 |
