The Supreme Court decided on some high-profile cases Thursday.
Here’s what you need to know:
President Trump took to Twitter saying it “seems totally ridiculous” that a question about citizenship was blocked from appearing on the census.
This comes after the Supreme Court ruled that there was sufficient reason for concern about why the Department of Commerce wanted to add the question, and insufficient explanation.
Trump said in the tweet that he’s asked lawyers if they could delay the census.
He continued, “Can anyone really believe that as a great Country, we are not able to ask whether or not someone is a Citizen. Only in America!”
Several Democratic presidential candidates weighed in on Thursday afternoon following the SCOTUS decision to block the citizenship question from being added to the 2020 census for now:
Read their reactions:
Statement from Mayor Bill de Blasio:
Rep. Elijah Cummings, the Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, who has led an investigation into how a question about citizenship ended up on the U.S. Census, told reporters he was so happy that the court ruled the way it did today. He said he plans to continue his investigation.
“I am relieved because I just felt like the question didn’t belong there,” Cummings said. “This was apparently an effort by Mr. Ross even before he got into office … one of the first things he did was to start working on this citizenship question even though he claimed the request was coming from DOJ.”
He said his committee will continue to work on its investigation.
“We are going to do everything in our power to get the documents that we need. The President and the administration have to stop stonewalling us and blocking us,” Cummings said.
In a reaction to today’s decision, Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel of MALDEF, plaintiffs in the census case, said in a statement that SCOTUS “effectively ruled.” He added that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross “lied to Congress and the public about the reasons he chose to add an unwarranted citizenship question to Census 2020.”
Saenz said Ross “now must try, in very short order, to fix his mess.”
Read Saenz’s full statement:
“Today, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively ruled that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross lied to Congress and the public about the reasons he chose to add an unwarranted citizenship question to Census 2020, and he now must try, in very short order, to fix his mess. This ruling vindicates the legal victory in MALDEF’s case in Maryland on the issue of pretext under the Administrative Procedures Act (APA). It is far from clear that Ross, accomplished prevaricator that he is, can put forward a legitimate explanation for his biased actions.
“At the same time, todays’ Supreme Court decision permits our live, ongoing claim — that the Trump administration intentionally discriminated against the Latino community in violation of the Constitution — to move forward to prevent the citizenship question from staying on Census 2020. We will be immediately pursuing that claim in Maryland federal District Court and in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, confident that the increasingly clear picture of conspired racial discrimination will prevail in removing any doubt about the impropriety of the late-added citizenship query.”
Justice Stephen Breyer, joined in part by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan, agreed that the Commerce Secretary provided a “pretextual reason” for adding the question. But they would have gone further. They wrote separately to say the decision violated a federal law, the Administrative Procedure Act that regulates how agencies establish their rules.
He wrote that asking the question “risked undermining public confidence in the integrity of our democratic system itself.”
Justice Thomas joined in part by Gorsuch and Kavanaugh would have allowed the citizenship question on the census.
Here’s what he wrote in his dissenting opinion:
The data collected by the census is used to determine things like how many representatives a state gets in Congress or how much money a state gets in federal funds. But another important part of the census is collecting demographic information about the population.
Over the years, the census has asked questions about race, sex, education, housing, occupation, military service, and marriage status.
The question about United States citizenship has also appeared on the census throughout the years.
Here’s a look at where the question has been asked in the past:
It’s important to note here that the Census Bureau said they decided to move the question because “general census information on citizenship had become less importance compared to other possible questions to be included on the census” because there was a requirement for annual alien registration that collected that information. The requirement was repealed in 1981.
Chief Justice Roberts, writing with the support of the liberal justices, said that the Commerce Department has to better explain the reason for adding the question.
The court’s decision raises the question of whether the Trump Administration will have enough time or the ability to add the citizenship question to the census.
The Administration previously told the Supreme Court that the questionnaire needed to be printed by the end of June.
Roberts writes “—the sole stated reason—seems to have been contrived. We are presented, in other words, with an explanation for agency action that is incongruent with what the record reveals about the agency’s priorities and decisionmaking process.”
The Supreme Court blocked a citizenship question from being added to the 2020 census for now.
Writing for a 5-4 majority, Chief Justice Roberts concluded that there was sufficient reason for concern about why the Department of Commerce wanted to add the question, and insufficient explanation.
The Supreme Court has issued an opinion regarding a bitter controversy over whether the Trump administration can ask all recipients a citizenship question on the 2020 census for the first time since 1950.
The data obtained from the 2020 census is used for the allocation of congressional seats and the distribution of billions of federal dollars to states and localities over the next decade.
Chief Justice Roberts is reading the opinion.
Several Democratic presidential candidates posted on social media following the SCOTUS decision on partisan gerrymandering:
Read their reactions:
Rep. David Lewis, who oversees the creation of congressional and legislative voting maps in the North Carolina General Assembly, said the Supreme Courts’ ruling on gerrymandering was clear.
He called on plaintiffs who are challenging gerrymandering in state courts to drop their case at a news conference in Raleigh, North Carolina Thursday.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court showed how much difference who wins the presidency makes.
Armed with a five to four conservative majority thanks to President Donald Trump’s appointment of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh over the past two years, the Supreme Court said it had no role to play in partisan gerrymandering — a decision that amounts to a massive political victory for Republicans, not just in the moment, but also likely for the next decade-plus.
While the court didn’t give Republicans everything they wanted on Thursday — rejecting the addition of a citizenship question to the census that the Trump administration had pushed for — the ruling on line-drawing with political concerns as a primary motivation is an absolute game-changer for a party that has already reaped the considerable rewards of its ongoing domination at the state legislative level.
What SCOTUS said Thursday was, essentially, if state legislators want to draw the lines of their own districts and those of their members of Congress using political calculations, it’s not the court’s job to stop them. That state legislatures are given that power and can exert it as they see fit.
On its face, this ruling impacts both parties equally. After all, both parties have shown a willingness over the last several decades to push their partisan advantage in the decennial line-drawing process. And the cases on which the court ruled on Thursday involved one Democratic gerrymander (Maryland) and one Republican one (North Carolina).
But, to see things through that this-hurts-both-sides-equally frame is to miss the forest for the trees. Thanks to avalanche elections in their favor in 2010 and 2014, Republicans have an absolute stranglehold on the state governments.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, Republicans currently have full control over 30 of the 49 partisan legislatures in the country. (Nebraska has a unicameral legislature where members are elected on a nonpartisan basis.) In 22 states, Republicans not only control both chambers of the state legislature but also hold the governorship – giving them total control over state government. (Democrats have total control in 14 states while control is divided between the parties in 13 states.)
While those raw numbers are startling, they don’t even fully tell the story of why Thursday’s gerrymandering ruling is such good political news for Republicans. The key fact? In most of the large population states where seats are expected to be gained or lost – based on population increase or decrease over the last decade – Republicans have total control, and large enough majorities that should insulate that control barring a massive Democratic landslide in 2020.
Take Texas, which is projected to gain three new congressional seats after the next census due to its off-the-charts population surge. Gov. Greg Abbott (R) was just reelected in 2018. In both the state House and state Senate, Republicans have comfortable majorities — although those majorities were reduced somewhat by Democrats in the 2018 midterms. Which means that Republicans are going to be in charge of drawing what the congressional lines will be in the state through 2030 — and now, thanks to the Supreme Court, have no concern of losing a constitutional challenge that they drew districts solely to leverage their political position.
Florida, which is expected to gain two more seats after the 2020 census, is a similar situation. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) was elected in 2018. Republicans have a 23-17 seat edge in the state Senate and a 73-47 margin in the state House. Which means — and stop me if you’ve heard this before — that Republicans will have unfettered control of drawing a map that heavily advantages their party’s political prospects not just in the 2022 election but all he way through the 2030 census.
Now, there’s no question that Republicans — thanks to the gains they made in 2010 — have already drawn a bunch of maps that come close to maximizing their political edge. Put another way: They’ve already squeezed a lot of juice from the gerrymandering fruit, and it’s not clear how much is left.
And there will likely be a renewed push — in the wake of the court’s ruling — by Democrats and election reform types to pass laws that take the line-drawing out of the hands of state legislators and give that power to independent/bipartisan/nonpartisan commissions.
But, in order for those sorts of efforts to work, state legislatures have to willingly give up a huge bit of political power. And politicians — of either party — are not big on that sort of thing.
Make no mistake: The Supreme Court’s ruling on partisan gerrymandering is a massive moment in electoral politics. It could very well help Republicans retake control of the US House as soon as 2022 and, if the party plays things smartly over the next two years, could well put them in position to hold that majority for much of the next decade.
In response to the Supreme Court’s ruling on the issue of partisan gerrymandering, Sam Berger, vice president of Democracy and Government Reform at the Center for American Progress, issued the following statement:
In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan, writes: “Of all times to abandon the Court’s duty to declare the law, this was not the one. The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government. Part of the Court’s role in that system is to defend its foundations. None is more important than free and fair elections. With respect but deep sadness, I dissent.”
She added: “And gerrymandering is, as so many Justices have emphasized before, anti-democratic in the most profound sense.”
On Friday, Kagan had joined Justice Stephen Breyer in sounding the alarm on precedent.
CNN’s Ariane De Vogue contributed reporting.
Chief Justice John Roberts said that it should be up to the states to address the issue of partisan gerrymandering, not federal judges.
He sided with the 5-4 conservative majority.
Here’s what he wrote in his opinion:
He also added,
