SCOTUS Loses Its Census over Citizenship
Supreme Court Justice John Roberts may go down in judicial history as the worst Republican SCOTUS pick ever. The man who found ObamaCare constitutional by inventing the fiction that it was a tax has joined the court’s four liberals to block a citizenship question on the 2020 Census, not because it is unconstitutional, but rather because he didn’t like the Trump administration’s reasons for asking for it.
The man who supervises the FISA Court, which blindly accepted every lie and fake document the Obama FBI and DoJ put before it to justify the deep state coup against the Trump presidency, says the reasons Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross presented for requesting its inclusion, well, didn’t smell right. As the New York Times reported:
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, said the explanation offered by the Trump administration for adding the question “appears to have been contrived.”…
“The secretary,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “was determined to reinstate a citizenship question from the time he entered office; instructed his staff to make it happen; waited while commerce officials explored whether another agency would request census-based citizenship data; subsequently contacted the attorney general himself to ask if D.O.J. would make the request; and adopted the Voting Rights Act rationale late in the process.”
“Altogether,” the chief justice wrote, “the evidence tells a story that does not match the explanation the secretary gave for his decision.”
So bleepin’ what? The question before the Court is whether adding the question to the Census form was constitutional or not and certainly whatever reason Ross gave made more sense than your reason, Justice Roberts, for calling ObamaCare a tax. How about the reason that the federal government has asked its, dare we use the word, citizens the question before. The Supreme Court is a great admirer of precedent, is it not, As Breitbart News notes:
The first census to ask about citizenship was the one conducted in 1820, and the last was 1950. After 1950, the Census Bureau -- which is part of the Commerce Department -- has continued to ask that question on the “long form” census form that goes to some census-takers, as well as on its yearly questionnaire that goes to a small number of households each year, called the American Community Survey (ACS).
The Census is used for everything from the distribution of federal funding, to enforcing the Voting Rights Act, to the required redrawing of Congressional district lines. The reason the Democrats want to count illegal aliens is to shift the demographics of America, pick up extra congressional seats from places like Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, and turn red states purple if not outright blue.
Asking this question is necessary to the functioning of a modern state and is an international norm, not the wet dream of white supremacists. As Hans von Spankovsky writes in the Washington Examiner:
To have an informed debate, shouldn’t we have accurate information about the citizen/noncitizen population of the country? In fact, even the United Nations recommends that its member countries ask a citizenship question on their census surveys, and countries ranging from Australia to Germany to Indonesia all ask this question. Only in the U.S. is this considered at all controversial -- and it shouldn’t be.
Knowing who we are is as important as knowing how many we are, a fact recognized internationally by nations still holding on to their sovereignty. As Marc A. Thiessen writes in the Washington Post:
There is nothing wrong with asking about citizenship. Canada asks a citizenship question on its census. So do Australia and many other U.S. allies. The U.S. government asked about citizenship for 130 years -- from 1820 to 1950 -- as part of the decennial “short form” census and continued to do so in the “long form” survey -- distributed to 1 in 6 people -- through 2000, when the long form was replaced by the annual American Community Survey. The ACS goes to about 2.6 percent of the population each year and asks about citizenship to this day…
Illegal immigrants are here illegally. If they choose to violate U.S. law yet again by refusing to participate in the census because of a perfectly legitimate question about citizenship, that’s not the U.S. government’s fault.
The citizenship question on the census matters because citizenship itself matters, or at least it still should. In an era where progressives insist education and health care is a right for every human being and that proving who you are shouldn’t be a requirement to vote, where illegal aliens from South America can get in-state college tuition but children of war vets from neighboring states cannot, does citizenship even matter? Should a migrant from Somalia be entitled to determine the representative from a Minnesota congressional district?
Restoring the citizenship question to the Census is not unprecedented, not unconstitutional and absolutely necessary to help restore our national identity watered down by the “we are the world” globalists and denounced by the 2020 Democrats who want to decriminalize illegal border crossing and throw the borders open.
One hopes the Trump administration will come back with reasons in words of one syllable that even John Roberts can understand. SCOTUS still needs to decide whether the citizenship question is constitutional and whether citizenship even matters any more.
Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.