CENSUS BUREAU TESTS IMPACT OF CITIZENSHIP QUESTION | Chief Justice About To Reveal All | More Than 20 Cases Still To Be Decided
June 12, 2019
COUNTING CHICKENS BEFORE THEY HATCH
|While the country waits for the Supreme Court’s decision on the matter, the Census Bureau announced yesterday that it plans to test just how much a new question on citizenship would affect its task of counting the U.S. population. Surveys that look similar to the 2020 census form will go out to 480,000 households this week as part of the test, with one version having the citizenship question and one without it. Gregory Wallace with CNN reports.
READ 'EM AND WEEP
|Joan Biskupic with CNN says CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS is about to show his cards and reveal just how far he’s willing to go to protect the perception of the institution as a non-political body. She writes,”This is the first time in Roberts’ 14 years as chief justice that he will likely be the deciding vote on several final, tense cases — a total of 24 over the next two weeks.” The stakes are high, with cases concerning partisan gerrymandering and the Census still to be decided. “Supreme Court justices can be inscrutable, and on Monday, nothing in Roberts’ nor his colleagues’ courtroom demeanor revealed what to expect between June 17 (when the nine are scheduled to return to the bench) and the end of the month.”
TOP-ED
|In The Washington Post, Ronald A. Klein argues that we need to prepare for a complete reversal of the role SCOTUS plays in all of our lives. He wonders, “Are we ready for a constitutional order in which the Supreme Court no longer stands for equality and progress — or no longer is merely indifferent to those aims, as it has been more recently — but becomes a bulwark of retrogression and reversal? That was the Supreme Court of 100 years ago, and it could be back sooner than any of us ever believed.”
TODAY IN HISTORY
|On this day in 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck down state laws prohibiting interracial marriages in the case of Loving v. Virginia.