In a surprise decision that will help preserve fair political representation, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked the Trump administration from adding a question to the 2020 census asking U.S. residents about their citizenship status, instead sending the case back to lower court for it to explore explosive new evidence behind the GOP’s motives for including the question.
The addition of this citizenship question would have likely had a chilling effect, intimidating millions of people in immigrant communities into not participating in the census. That in turn would have turbocharged a new wave of hyperpartisan Republican gerrymandering nationwide, since census data is the bedrock of redistricting.
This impact was in fact the entire rationale behind this question: In a recent bombshell report, based on newly unearthed documents from a deceased GOP political consultant, Thomas Hofeller, Republicans admitted that rigging the census would eviscerate the political power of Democrats and voters of color.
The Constitution mandates that every person in the U.S. be counted in the decennial census, without regard to their legal status. A question on citizenship hasn't been included in the census since 1950, and even when it has appeared, it has never been asked of every single participant, as the Trump administration intended it to be in 2020. Furthermore, multiple lower courts had ruled that Trump's attempt to add the question violated both federal law and the Constitution.
Those courts uniformly dismissed the Trump administration's claim that the Justice Department needed data on citizenship to enforce the Voting Rights Act as a bogus pretext that masked their true motives. Hofeller’s document trove revealed the GOP’s racist and partisan intent: allowing mapmakers to use citizenship statistics result in "a disadvantage to the Democrats" and to be "advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites."
Although the Census Bureau had planned to print millions of census forms in July, plaintiffs argued that it could delay printing until October to give the courts time to resolve the case. Now, the case will go back to the federal district court in New York that originally heard the matter. That will allow the judge to conduct an in-depth review of the new evidence and craft a ruling that addresses the Trump administration's racial and partisan animus. In the likely event that the lower court once again blocks the question, the Supreme Court may let such a ruling stand following its latest decision.
Given the blatant display of partisan and racial bigotry behind the GOP's plans, this ruling averted a major blow to democracy that would have rivaled the harms of both 2000's Bush v. Gore decision and the 2013 ruling that crippled the Voting Rights Act. Although the Supreme Court’s Republican majority has advanced an increasingly partisan agenda that undermines the rule of law, Trump's malicious effort to weaponize the census simply proved to be too extreme for the court to accept.