In a stunning development on Tuesday, the Trump administration conceded defeat in its quest to weaponize the 2020 census by adding a damaging citizenship question, with the administration ordering printing of millions of census forms to go ahead without the inclusion of the question. That decision to cave comes after the Supreme Court last week rejected the administration's justification for the question as a pretext and told it to come up with a true motive if it wanted to go forward with adding the citizenship question, something the administration didn't appear willing to attempt to do.
The addition of this 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 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 results in "a disadvantage to the Democrats" and be "advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites."
While the Supreme Court didn’t rule on the basis of the evidence in the Hofeller files, Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the court's liberals to demand the administration come up with its true motive instead of their pretext of Voting Rights Act enforcement, which could have opened the door to litigating over the Hofeller evidence. While many observers feared that ruling was simply Roberts telling Republicans to lie more convincingly to win his approval, the Trump administration appears to have simply run out of time after it repeatedly told the courts it couldn’t wait past early July to start printing millions of census forms.
Given the blatant display of partisan and racial bigotry behind the GOP's plans, the court's ruling last week averted a major blow to democracy that would have rivaled the harms of both 2000's Bush v. Gore decision and Roberts’ decision 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.