Chief Justice John Roberts joined with the liberal wing of the Supreme Court on Thursday to deny the Trump administration the authority to ask a question about citizenship on 2020 census questionnaires.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, called Roberts’ decision to join with the progressive justices on the high court a tragic “betrayal,” and said the census “was never a legitimate subject for scrutiny by courts.”
“We’ve had a citizenship question in the past,” Greenfield explained, writing for FrontPage Mag. “The particular lefty tactic of constantly litigating the [Trump] administration’s motives on decisions that had been carried out in the past with no fuss is wholly inappropriate.”
Traitor-in-Chief
In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court determined this week that the government has the right to ask the citizenship question, but that the decision to change Census Bureau policy is not justified. For his part, Roberts called the Trump administration’s reasoning “contrived,” and implied that the real justification for the change was political in nature.
However, Roberts’ attempt to gauge the deeper political meaning behind the inclusion of a citizenship question flies in the face of a previous high-profile Supreme Court decision that Roberts himself defended.
Writing the majority opinion in Trump v. Hawaii, which upheld the administration’s travel ban in June 2018, Roberts explained that when the president provides a “facially legitimate and bona fide” reason for some policy — particularly in “the area of national security” — the courts may not look for some subjective political motive.
But in this case, “Roberts joined great legal minds like Kagan, Sotomayor, Ginsburg, and Breyer in trying to psychoanalyze the true basis for the census question,” Greenfield wrote. “The basis for the question however has no relevance. The legal standing of it is the same unless there is clear evidence of an agenda that the court has an actual right to challenge. That’s not the case here.”
Finding under pressure
Greenfield went on to insist that Roberts “defects to the other side” when “lefties really make something a priority or his own social views interfere.” Indeed, the stakes couldn’t be higher when it comes to the citizenship question on the upcoming decennial census.
Current voting districts at the state and federal level are supposed to be roughly equal in population, regardless of the legal voting status of residents. However, Republicans want to differentiate between legal and non-legal residents because immigrants tend to flood Democratic-friendly districts, thereby improperly inflating the power of the vote in blue districts.
“If one district has far fewer eligible voters than another, each vote there has more influence on election outcomes,” a Reuters report explained.
“Democrats know they would probably lose seats at every level” if non-citizens weren’t counted in the census, said Albert Kauffman, a professor at St. Mary’s School of Law in San Antonio.
And when the pressure is high enough, Greenfield argued, Roberts has been known to capitulate to the left.
“No matter how weak the legal reasoning is, Justice Roberts can be expected to back lefties on the truly big and high pressure decisions,” Greenfield wrote. “By reaching his decision, Roberts has quite possibly blocked the appearance of the question. And that settles the issue.”
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