The battle over the Trump administration’s efforts to add a question on citizenship to the 2020 census is hitting the Supreme Court. The justices…
The battle over the Trump administration’s efforts to add a question on citizenship to the 2020 census is hitting the Supreme Court.
The justices will hear arguments on Tuesday over the administration adding the question, a controversial move that has sparked legal battles throughout the U. S. court system.
The Commerce Department, which administers the census, is expected to argue that it has the authority to collect data on citizenship, and that the question is needed to help with the Justice Department’s enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.
But opponents of the move, represented by the state of New York, will claim that adding the question will deter undocumented immigrations from filling out the survey, leading to an inaccurate count of the American population.
And two other parties – House Democrats and a collection of immigrant-rights groups led by the ACLU – will also be given a chance to argue to the justices that the addition of the question is unconstitutional.
The Trump administration has repeatedly seen controversial policies shot down by federal judges but then supported by the Supreme Court. And with three lower court judges blocking the citizenship question from being added to the census, next week’s arguments will present the justices with one of their biggest cases of the term.
The justices will ultimately have to decide if the Commerce Department’s decision to add the question, announced last year, was done arbitrarily and without proper study of the its impact. And they will also consider if asking the question violates the Enumeration Clause of the Constitution, which states that Congress must conduct an “actual enumeration,” or count, of the population.
Court observers say the legal question will likely come down to whether Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross had the actual authority to reinstate the citizenship question to the census, roughly 70 years after it last appeared on the survey.
The administration has argued in briefs to the Supreme Court that Ross acted well within his rights to add the question, citing Congress’s decision to hand over administration of the census to the Commerce Department under the Census Act.
