Roberts Wants to Ignore Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Bias Again

After oral argument Tuesday at the U.S. Supreme Court, it seems modestly likely that a majority of the justices is poised to allow the Trump administration to ask a citizenship question on the 2020 census. That would overturn a lower court decision holding, essentially, that Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross didn’t state his true reasons for wanting to add the question in the first place.

What’s tricky and interesting is how the conservative majority can get there. The district court opinion, a 277-page effort by Judge Jesse Furman, went to great lengths to suggest that Ross wasn’t motivated by his stated reason of needing the information to enforce the Voting Rights Act. Instead, the opinion hinted that Ross was probably motivated by partisan politics — and the hope that asking whether respondents are citizens would discourage some people, particularly in immigrant and minority families, from answering the census at all. Undercounting in their districts would result in less representation in Congress and less federal funding.