06-27-2019, 03:35 PM
deckeda wrote:
WIlbur will get another shot at explaining himself to the lower court, and might win after all
Good luck with that, given what we now know was the reason (as opposed to the initially proposed excuse re: Voting Act)
It's a challenge for Commerce's lawyers, but the justices have effectively lowered the bar here.
An ugly detail here is that the Court also found that the lower court should not have ordered Commerce to reveal its decisionmaking records in discovery, but should only have asked Commerce to provide an addendum to its filings giving more detail. Only because the parties agreed to the inclusion of additional evidence in the record did the Court even review the materials that revealed faulty reasoning. This gives the administration vast freedom to conceal elements of its decisionmaking, and present only what it deems its most compelling reasoning in court.
If this ruling had protected Commerce from revealing its faulty reasoning in this case (a counterfactual circumstance), the Court would have had no basis on which to deem their reasoning inadequate/capricious, and the citizenship question would have been deemed appropriate for the census. In other words, this case was a one-off. The challenger won't get nearly so much ammunition for making its case next time...
deckeda wrote:
the census CAN have a citizenship question on it, in theory
Which "theory" would that be? Does the constitution specifically mention including citizenship questions, because Roberts suddenly seems all about whatever's in the ancient text.
No - but because the Constitution nowhere prohibits the question from being asked, there is no Constitutional justification to exclude it. That discretion is left to the executive branch, which must only follow the law and its regulations in deciding what to ask.