Trump Administration’s Reasoning for Seeking Citizenship Status of Census Respondents ‘Contrived’: Supreme Court
by Jordan Hilger, Worthy News Correspondent
(Worthy News) – The Supreme Court rejected an attempt by the Trump administration to place a citizenship question on the 2020 census questionnaire Thursday, leading Trump to suggest a delay to the census count beyond April of next year.
Chief Justice John Roberts, in the majority decision, cited the failure of the administration to provide a “reasoned” explanation of why it wanted to do so, seeing its claim that citizenship data would help in enforcement of the 1965 Voting Rights Act as “contrived.”
Justice Clarence Thomas, along with Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, dissented, calling the decision’s presumption of foul play on the part of the administration a slippery slope rooted in bad faith.
“Unable to identify any legal problem with the Secretary’s reasoning, the Court imputes one by concluding that he must not be telling the truth,” Thomas wrote in his rebuttal, which recommended the court reverse its decision. “With today’s decision, the court has opened a Pandora’s box of pretext-based challenges in administrative law,” he further added.
Trump echoed Thomas’s sentiment in a tweet Thursday to the effect that “only in America” is a government not allowed to ask whether respondents are citizens in a national census, saying he was seeking the counsel of lawyers to see whether the census could be delayed until the Supreme Court was supplied with enough information to permit the addition of the question.