TRUMP NOT READY TO GIVE UP ON CENSUS FIGHT | Will The President Issue An Executive Order Over Census?
July 5, 2019
HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY
|As of Tuesday evening, COMMERCE SECRETARY WILBUR ROSS said the administration was dropping its effort to add the citizenship question to the 2020 census and was printing the questionnaire forms without the question. But on Wednesday, the White House said it’s not ready to give up the gun, as PRESIDENT TRUMP “is looking at every option within his legal authority to add such a question.” The Washington Post reports, “Census officials and lawyers at the Justice and Commerce departments scrapped holiday plans and spent their Independence Day seeking new legal rationales for a citizenship question that critics say could lead to a steep undercount of immigrants, which could limit federal funding to some communities and skew congressional redistricting to favor Republicans.”
AND HERE'S HOW TO DO IT
|“The president should issue an executive order stating that, to comply with the requirements of Section 2 of the 14th Amendment, the citizenship question will be added to the 2020 census. In addition, he can order the Commerce Department to undertake, on an emergency basis, a new Census Act rulemaking.” That’s David B. Rivkin Jr. and Gilson B. Gray in The Wall Street Journal explaining how PRESIDENT TRUMP could get his way on this one. They note an executive order would trigger another round of litigation that would likely force the Supreme Court to step in during its summer recess. “While rare, such an emergency review has happened before. With the justification for the citizenship question being clear and compelling, the administration should prevail.”
LIMITED PATHS FORWARD
|Indeed, the president has few options for how he could put the citizenship question back on the census: He could issue an executive order, or include the question as part of a supplement to the questionnaire that’s already being printed. But Ariane de Vogue and Maegan Vazquez with CNN report that a government official says that an executive order adding the question just isn’t “realistic” at this point.
FOR NOW OR FOR GOOD
|For The Atlantic, Garrett Epps writes that the vote of CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS in the census case makes it seem as if he “would no longer play rubber-stamp judge.” However, Epps points out, “Much of the future of our democracy depends on whether this was a cosmetic move by a reluctant Trump supporter or a genuine renaissance of Roberts’s judicial conscience.”
FREE FALLIN'
|In The Washington Post, Eric Holder offered hope on the Fourth of July yesterday for those who worry the Supreme Court has put our democracy into a free fall by undermining voting rights and equal representation. Holder: “Although the situation is dire, there are still tools — litigation, reform efforts, winning state and local elections, and citizen advocacy — that we must pursue to restore fairness to our democracy…At this moment when our political system is being tested in so many ways, the American people cannot take our democracy for granted. That democracy was bought with the blood of the first Americans more than two centuries ago and maintained by the sacrifices of patriots on this and foreign soil since then. This is not a time for despair; this is a time for concerted and coordinated action, especially in the states.”
SCOTUS VIEWS
The Worst Part About DOJ’s Reversal On The Census Is The Lack Of Deliberation
The Washington Post“If the department continues to jump at the president’s every hiccup — candor and consistency be damned — it may find that the courts are more likely to deny it the traditional benefit of the doubt and reject its litigating positions. That is more than an embarrassment for the front-line lawyers; it is a body blow to the department’s institutional interests and, potentially, the public’s confidence in a government of laws, not of men.”
One Person, One Vote? Not With A Republican Party And Supreme Court Justices Like These.
Detroit Free Press“Your rich cousin might have a bigger house, cast a larger shadow in social circles, and make more generous contributions to favored candidates and causes than you do, but when you go to the polls, your vote counts exactly the same. Or at least, it used to.”