U.S. Supreme Court blocks Trump's census citizenship question, for now

[Sociopathicsteelerfan]

(06-27-2019, 04:08 PM)Crazyjdawg Wrote: They may assume the identity of non-partisanship, but they still have their own thoughts and beliefs and, sometimes, those thoughts and opinions, as well as their qualifications as a judge, are significant factors in why they were nominated.

In other words, it is my belief that a judge appointed by a pro-life president is more likely to be pro-life than a judge appointed by a pro-choice president. Just like a judge appointed by a pro-LGBT rights president is more likely to be pro-LGBT rights than a judge appointed by an anti-LGBT rights president.

I don't think recognizing the inherent biases of the human condition is any more partisan than those who are voting along their own partisan lines, whether they like to believe they are being objective or not.

It's interesting that your would use abortion as your example as it's a rare example of a court decision that can logically be ruled on either way.  The vast majority of cases that come before the SCOTUS are not of that nature.  In this limited instance I will concur with your assessment.

[GMDino]

Hold on to your hats folks!  The Donald J Trump Circus Show is coming to town!

After Trump tweeted about "delaying" the census...after starting to print the census forms...after the DOJ saying they were not going to fight to add the citizenship question...after DJT tweeted that they WERE going to keep fighting...the DOJ says they were "ordered" to find a path to adding the question.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/07/03/president-trump-sows-confusion-over-2020-census-citizenship-question/1638884001/

Quote:Justice Department looking for way to include citizenship question in census despite Supreme Court ruling

WASHINGTON – Reversing themselves after one day, President Donald Trump and his Justice Department said Wednesday they are looking for ways to include a citizenship question in the 2020 census despite an adverse ruling from the Supreme Court.

"The News Reports about the Department of Commerce dropping its quest to put the Citizenship Question on the Census is incorrect or, to state it differently, FAKE!" Trump tweeted. "We are absolutely moving forward, as we must, because of the importance of the answer to this question."

When a federal judge later demanded an explanation of Trump's tweet, an attorney for the Justice Department said "it is still assessing" whether the government can include a citizenship question, even though the high court ruled against it last week.

"We at the Department of Justice have been instructed to examine whether there is a path forward, consistent with the Supreme Court's decision, that would allow us to include the citizenship question on the census," said Assistant Attorney General Joseph Hunt in a telephone conference call with U.S. District Judge George Hazel.

Hunt reiterated that position in a letter to U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman in New York, who has jurisdiction over a separate census case. 

"In the event that the Commerce Department adopts a new rationale for including the citizenship question on the 2020 Decennial Census consistent with the decision of the Supreme Court, the Government will immediately notify this Court," Hunt wrote.

That contradicts what the Trump administration said Tuesday, and it was obvious a day later that even the administration was confused. 

"Obviously, as you can imagine, I am doing my absolute best to figure out what's going on," Justice Department lawyer Josh Gardner told Hazel in the conference call.

Attorneys for challengers who sued over the citizenship question accused Trump of seeking to disobey the Supreme Court ruling and sow doubts about the sanctity of the census within the immigrant community.

Trump's own Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross said in a statement Tuesday that "the Census Bureau has started the process of printing the decennial questionnaires without the question" about citizenship.

In addition, a Justice Department attorney advised lawyers in the case that "the decision has been made" to print census forms without the citizenship question, and to forgo any attempt to re-litigate the issue.  

Quote:
[/url]Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump




The News Reports about the Department of Commerce dropping its quest to put the Citizenship Question on the Census is incorrect or, to state it differently, FAKE! We are absolutely moving forward, as we must, because of the importance of the answer to this question.

[url=https://twitter.com/intent/like?tweet_id=1146435093491277824]63K
11:06 AM - Jul 3, 2019
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Plaintiffs in lawsuits against the administration said Trump is ignoring the law.



“This administration’s flagrant disregard of court orders is appalling, and will result in the same kind of misinformation that leads our communities to be reluctant to participate in the Census," said Denise Hulett, national senior counsel at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.


Trump did not detail how the administration planned to move forward, a week after the Supreme Court ruled the Commerce Department had failed to justify its plan to include a citizenship question on the 2020 Census.


As a result of Trump's tweet, Judge Hazel, who maintains jurisdiction over one challenge to the administration's effort, hastily scheduled a lawyers' conference to seek clarity from the administration.


Trump's options seemed limited: The government faces deadlines for printing and distributing census forms.
One possibility would be for the printing of census forms without the citizenship question to continue, but as a safety valve should all legal appeals fail. Two federal district judges in Maryland and New York maintain jurisdiction over separate cases, even following the Supreme Court ruling.

In New York, challengers' attorneys have asked District Judge Jesse Furman to sanction two administration officials who they said misled the judge during a trial about the reasons for the citizenship question. Furman has scheduled briefing through the summer.


And in Maryland, Judge Hazel has been ordered by a federal appeals court to examine new evidence pointing to racial motives for the citizenship question's inclusion: disempowering Hispanics. That would be unnecessary if the administration is dropping its legal efforts, something Hazel asked Justice Department lawyers to put in writing during a telephone conference call Tuesday.


On Wednesday, Hazel demanded the same stipulation by Friday afternoon or an agreement that his court will move forward with an equal protection challenge to the citizenship question.


The Trump administration could also continue to pursue the citizenship question with an eye toward future censuses, while allowing the 2020 census to proceed without it.


Plaintiffs who had sued the government over the census question said requiring a citizenship question would result in an undercount of Hispanics, who live predominantly in areas represented by Democrats. That could cause some states to lose seats in Congress for the next decade, including California, Texas, Florida and New York.


In its ruling last week, the Supreme Court said the administration had not justified its position, and it sent the matter back to the Commerce Department. The administration could come up with a new justification and re-litigate the issue, but that could take months.


Meanwhile, the chairman of the House subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, said the director of the U.S. Census Bureau, Steven Dillingham, will testify at a hearing on July 24.

“It is time for the Census Bureau to move beyond all the outside political agendas and distractions and devote its full attention to preparing for the 2020 Census,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the subcommittee chairman.

How, in a sane world, could the DOJ come up with a new "justification" that wouldn't be seen as tainted by the original/real justification that got thrown out?

DJT has zero respect for anything that disagrees with him being "right".  So sad.

[GMDino]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/trump-says-he-is-thinking-of-executive-order-to-revive-census-citizenship-question/2019/07/05/d3ec5986-9f20-11e9-9ed4-c9089972ad5a_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.8dadc0d9b17b

Quote:President Trump said Friday that he is “thinking of” issuing an executive order to add a controversial citizenship question to the 2020 Census, telling reporters at the White House that he is exploring four or five different options to move forward.



Trump raised the possibility that some kind of addendum could be printed separately after further litigation of the issue, a move would almost certainly carry additional costs and may not be feasible, according to census experts.


“We’ll see what happens,” Trump said. “We could start the printing now and maybe do an addendum after we get a positive decision. So we’re working on a lot of things including an executive order.”


Census experts say that among other concerns, such an addendum would likely violate the bureau’s strict rules on testing a question, which include considering how the placement of a question on the form affects respondents’ likelihood of filling it out.


[Top USCIS official suggests census citizenship question could help with ‘burden’ of illegal immigration]



Trump’s comments came as government lawyers scramble to find a legal path to carry out the president’s wishes despite their conclusions in recent days that no such avenue exists.


Census officials and lawyers at the Justice and Commerce departments scrapped holiday plans and spent 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.


A federal judge in Maryland overseeing one of three lawsuits on the citizenship question has given the Trump administration until 2 p.m. Friday to explain how it intends to proceed.

U.S. District Judge George J. Hazel has indicated he is poised to authorize litigants to start producing information in the case before him, which raises questions about whether the government had a discriminatory intent in asking for the addition.


In a call shortly before the 2 p.m. deadline, a Department of Justice lawyer said the government still doesn’t know what it plans to do, according to Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which represents some of the plaintiffs challenging the question.


In the absence of a decision by the government, Saenz said the two sides had agreed to file competing schedules to Hazel for discovery in the case.


A person familiar with the DOJ deliberations also said it was still assessing options as the 2 p.m. deadline loomed.

“It’s kind of shocking that they still don’t know what they’re doing,” he said. “We’re in this posture because they don’t know what the real plan is.”


The government has begun printing the census forms without the question, and that process will continue, administration officials said.


[Trump administration scrambles to save citizenship question on census]


The question had seemed settled after the Supreme Court ruled last week against the Trump administration. As late as Tuesday evening, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the census, said the administration was dropping its effort and was printing the census forms without the citizenship question.


But Trump, in tweets Wednesday and Thursday, said he was not giving up. He tweeted Thursday morning: “So important for our Country that the very simple and basic ‘Are you a Citizen of the United States?’ question be allowed to be asked in the 2020 Census. Department of Commerce and the Department of Justice are working very hard on this, even on the 4th of July!”



The reversal came after Trump talked by phone with conservative allies who urged him not to give up the fight, according to a senior White House official and a Trump adviser, who both spoke on the condition of anonymity.


In the Supreme Court’s splintered ruling last week, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the government had provided a “contrived” reason for wanting the information, seemingly leaving open the door for the government to offer a new justification and see whether it satisfies the court. An executive order from Trump and a new rationale given by Ross on the basis of that order could give the administration something to take back to the justices.


Trump told reporters Friday that the White House was surprised by the Supreme Court decision and that he found it “very shocking” that the citizenship question could not be included.

Trump said he believes the rationale provided by Ross “can be expanded very simply.”


“He made a statement,” Trump said of Ross. “He wrote something out. The judge didn’t like it. I have a lot of respect for Justice Roberts. But he didn’t like it, but he did say come back. Essentially, he said come back.”


[Despite Trump administration denials, new evidence suggest census citizenship question was crafted to benefit white Republicans]


Saenz derided the idea that an executive order could brush aside the 15 months of litigation that culminated in the high court’s ruling.


“Despite what yesterday’s military show may have looked like, the United States is not a Soviet bloc dictatorship,” Saenz said, referring to the “Salute to America” event that Trump staged on Thursday. “Executive orders do not override decisions of the Supreme Court. Separation of powers remains, as it has been for over 200 years, a critical part of our constitutional scheme.”

Earlier Friday, Ken Cuccinelli, Trump’s acting U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services director, said during an appearance on Fox Business Network that there’s a “high chance” that Trump would find a way, either through executive order or “another administrative way, to ask the simple census question.”


Cuccinelli said he met with Trump this week and the president “was very determined about this.”


In litigation earlier this year, the government stressed that forms needed to go to the printer by July 1, prompting the Supreme Court to expedite its consideration of the question.


In a June filing to the court, Solicitor General Noel Francisco noted that witnesses at trial had said changes to the questionnaire after June 2019 “would impair the Census Bureau’s ability to timely administer the 2020 census,” and that a delay until October would be feasible only with “exceptional resources.”

Moron.

[Yojimbo]

(07-05-2019, 03:12 PM)GMDino Wrote: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/trump-says-he-is-thinking-of-executive-order-to-revive-census-citizenship-question/2019/07/05/d3ec5986-9f20-11e9-9ed4-c9089972ad5a_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.8dadc0d9b17b



Moron.

In this case, I think it’s less moron and more partisan hackery. The Republicans know if they can take advantage of the census, it could lead to another decade of controlling state governments and possibly The House. So, they are going to pull out every dirty trick in the book on this.

[GMDino]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/trumps-census-case-confession/593488/?fbclid=IwAR3dNcAxZEcHEn-ZMLmmBrDy5xokqgQ6xF0Kg6WcU4jgdL8wejgJV3w3uLA

Quote:Trump Lied to the Supreme Court, and Four Justices Don’t Care

The White House insisted allegations that it wanted to add a citizenship question to the survey for political reasons were conspiracy theories, right up until the moment the president confirmed them.


“There is no smoking gun here; only smoke and mirrors,” the Department of Justice insisted when liberal groups uncovered evidence that the Trump administration was seeking to add a citizenship question to the census for the purpose of enhancing white voting power through redistricting. The Justice Department characterized the new evidence as resembling “the product of a conspiracy theorist.” The respondents’ “conspiracy theory” was “implausible on its face,” Solicitor General Noel Francisco echoed in a brief written for the Supreme Court in June.

The conservative justices on the Supreme Court apparently found this argument very persuasive. The evidence that the Trump administration had consciously sought to use the census to strengthen white voting power was ultimately not a part of the case before the Court, which came down to whether the Trump administration had violated administrative law by misrepresenting its motives in adding the citizenship question.

Nevertheless, Justice Clarence Thomas mocked a lower-court judge for concluding, as did a majority of the Court, that the Trump administration misled the public when it said it wanted to add the citizenship question to better enforce the Voting Rights Act. “A judge predisposed to distrust the Secretary or the administration could arrange those facts on a corkboard and—with a jar of pins and a spool of string—create an eye-catching conspiracy web,” Thomas wrote in an opinion joined by Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Thomas even went so far as to accuse the majority of echoing “the din of suspicion and distrust that seems to typify modern discourse.” Justice Samuel Alito, for his part, argued that it was no business of the Court if the government had lied about a decision affecting the entire country.

Then Donald Trump himself confirmed that the “conspiracy theory” put forth by groups challenging the legality of the citizenship question was true.

“Number one, you need it for Congress for districting, you need it for appropriations, where are the funds going, how many people are there, are they citizens or not citizens?” Trump told reporters on Friday, explaining why the administration was reversing its original decision to abandon the citizenship question. That statement not only confirms that the majority in the census case was correct, it proves that the dissenters were defending a lie, while accusing their opponents of bad faith. Ironically, this sort of behavior is all too typical of Trump backers like Thomas.

This is a constant risk for Trumpists—that they will commit to vigorous defenses of Trumpian falsehoods, only to be made fools when the president abandons the deception or changes his mind, when it becomes politically convenient. Fortunately for them, the cult of personality surrounding the president is immune to the shame of forcefully defending things its members know not to be true. Unfortunately for the rest of us, that cult of personality now includes members of the Supreme Court, willing to give their implicit blessing to schemes designed to entrench white voting power, in defiance of the Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection regardless of race. Republican elites have concluded that restricting the electorate is a more reliable path to power than appealing to minority voters, and are now committed to the course of rigging elections so that they can maintain dominance even when they fail to win a majority of the votes.

For those keeping score at home, The Washington Post has documented at least 10 instances of the Trump administration contradicting its own statements on the citizenship question. When the Trump administration told Congress and the public that the citizenship question on the census was needed to enforce the Voting Rights Act, that was a lie. When the Trump administration denied that its intent was to use the data to draw congressional districts that would enhance white voting power and therefore grant Republicans an advantage, that was false. When Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told Congress the data would not be used for immigration enforcement, that was untrue. Francisco told the Court that the census questionnaire had to be finalized by June; the Department of Justice has now reversed that position.  

Ideally, the executive branch lying to the public and the other branches of government would hold certain consequences. But Democrats in Congress are too frightened and weak to properly discharge their oversight duties, and at least four justices on the Supreme Court believe that the law should bend to whatever falsehood Trump decides to embrace. Only Chief Justice John Roberts’s pained conclusion—that under administrative law, the Commerce Department could not justify its census decision based on public falsehoods—prevented the Trump administration’s dishonesty from being rewarded.

But even Roberts was willing to go only so far. The chief justice defended the constitutionality of the citizenship question, and implied that even if the motives for adding it were partisan, that might be acceptable—only the administration’s dishonesty was unlawful.


That raises the question of whether a renewed Trump-administration push to add the question might ultimately be successful. Mark Joseph Stern has argued that any rationale the Trump administration could come up with now would by definition be pretextual, but I am not so sure Roberts will see it that way, and his conservative colleagues were willing to back the Trump administration even when they knew it was lying.


The Supreme Court has seen lower moments in its history, such as its rewriting of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect corporations rather than the former slaves it was designed to enfranchise. It has countenanced greater evils, such as when it concluded that black people could never be citizens and when it gave its constitutional imprimatur to Jim Crow. But it has never been more pathetic.

[GMDino]

tl;dr

Trump says he won in court, Barr says Trump won because the SC was wrong.  Both say that the media reporting exactly what they both said (that there were legal ways to get the question on the census for next year and that DJT might use an EO to force it) were "hysterical".

I realize Trump didn't have any kind of reputation to lose, but Barr had a small one...and it's gone.  Lost in his complete and total capitulation to protecting Trump.

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/07/bill-barrs-snide-sycophantic-and-self-righteous-attack-on-the-media-told-us-everything-we-need-to-know-about-him/

Quote:When President Donald Trump stood up in the Rose Garden on Thursday to claim he was victorious in the Census fight even while surrendering, he was flanked by two of his top deputies. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who is largely responsible for the administration’s failed attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 survey, remained silent throughout the event.


But Attorney General Bill Barr got his turn at the lectern and used his time to revel in the tatters of his own credibility.


Perhaps most audaciously, he offered “congratulations” to Trump on the failure of the Census gambit, engaging in the humiliating pretense that the president’s new executive order to directing the administration to find alternatives to calculating the number of citizens wasn’t an option he could have taken a year and a half ago — and avoided this entire fight.

Let’s be clear: Trump utterly failed, and Barr congratulated him for it. This is pure sycophancy.
But it only got worse from there.

Barr tried to claim that the Supreme Court’s decision blocking the citizenship question was actually a vindication for the administration because it found the question “would be perfectly lawful.” Of course, “would be” is the key point here. Few have argued that including a citizenship question couldn’t be legal under some circumstances, just that the way the Trump administration went about it and tried to defend it — not to mention the reasons it had for this move — rendered the act unlawful. In other words, Barr was admitting that a more competent administration could have successfully added the question, but this one couldn’t.



“Put simply, the impediment was a logistical impediment, not a legal one,” Barr asserted.


In fact, there is a legal impediment to adding the question — that impediment is the Supreme Court’s ruling. It’s true that, if the administration had more time, it could have potentially been victorious in another attempt at adding the question. But that just highlight’s the administration’s incompetencies.

Barr’s next point was really his most outrageous. Indeed, it was blatant gaslighting.


“Some in the media have been suggesting in the hysterical mode of the day that the administration has been planning to add the citizenship question to the Census by executive fiat without regard to contrary court orders or what the Supreme Court might say,” Barr said. “This has been based on rank speculation and nothing more. 
As should be obvious, this has never been under consideration. We have already accepted that any new decision to add a citizenship question to the Census would be subject to judicial review.”


The idea that these fears were based on “rank speculation and nothing more” is ridiculous and insulting. There were multiple reports that cited administration officials conveying plans for such an idea, and even if these sources were wrong, they’re more than “rank speculation.”


More to the point, though, Trump and Barr’s own public comments suggested they were considering the executive fiat route.


Trump, for instance, tweeted after the Supreme Court ruled and his own administration said publicly that the citizenship question wouldn’t be on the Census: “The News Reports about the Department of Commerce dropping its quest to put the Citizenship Question on the Census is incorrect or, to state it differently, FAKE! We are absolutely moving forward, as we must, because of the importance of the answer to this question.”


When asked by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins last Friday if he was considering an executive order to put the question back on the Census, Trump said he was.


“We’re thinking about doing that. It’s one of the ways; we have four or five ways we can do it. It’s one of the ways that we’re thinking about doing it very seriously,” he said. “We could also add an addition on so we can start the printing now and maybe do an addendum after we get a positive decision. So we’re working on a lot of things, including an executive order.”


And Barr himself said Monday: “I think, over the next day or two, you’ll see what approach we’re taking and I think it does provide a pathway for getting the question on the census.”


Barr also told the Associated Press that the Supreme Court decision was “wrong” and that he believes there is “an opportunity potentially to cure the lack of clarity that was the problem and we might as well take a shot at doing that.”


But as Barr himself admitted on Thursday at the press conference: “As a practical matter, the Supreme Court’s decision closed all paths to adding the question to the 2020 Census.”


So Barr now admits that adding the question in a legal way was practically possible, even though just a few days ago he was saying that he was considering taking “a shot at doing that.” But he also thinks the media commentators who, apparently understanding the situation better than the attorney general, interpreted Barr and Trump’s comments to suggest they might be willing to defy the courts, were “hysterical.”



The best defense of Barr and Trump is that they’ve just been rambling along this whole time, not entirely sure what they were doing. More likely, they’re intentionally gaslighting their critics while trying to ensure they’re supporters that they’re winners when they’ve actually suffered near-total defeat.

To be clear if DJT says "there are four or five ways" to do something and "they are looking into it" he is NOT looking into it and no one has told him there are multiple ways.  That's just Trump BS that he spews every time he's confronted with something.  "We're looking into it" is a tic to protect him by implying he already knew there was a problem and he's working hard on it.

He's not.

Just like the lie about the huge, second middle class tax bill the GOP was going to present "right after the midterm elections", or his health care proposal, or any of the other times Trump said they would be "telling" us something "in a couple weeks,maybe days".

Lie after lie.  

But 1/3 of the voters love being lied to because they agree with the lie without the realization they are being played and it never happen.

[GMDino]

Trump on giving up the quest to put citizenship question on census: "Not only didn't I back down, I backed up." pic.twitter.com/pNV8QJWMb0

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 12, 2019

 

[GMDino]

Nothing to worry about here.  The states will take care of....hey!  Wait a minute!

NH Gov. Sununu just vetoed a bipartisan independent redistricting proposal. Yes, the one that passed the NH Senate unanimously.https://t.co/umLEixl5Yv

— Yurij Rudensky (@yurijrudensky) August 9, 2019