[EL] The Trump (Second) Cave on the Citizenship Question is a Double Victory for the Rule of Law

[Marty Lederman]

Note, by the way, that Trump was careful to say that some states "may want
to draw *state and local *legislative districts, based upon the voter
eligible population."

I take that to be an implicit concession that states can't do so for
congressional districts--as the Court held in *Wesberry*, 376 U.S. at 8-9.

On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 6:15 PM Rick Hasen <rhasen at law.uci.edu> wrote:

> The Trump (Second) Cave on the Citizenship Question is a Double Victory
> for the Rule of Law <https://electionlawblog.org/?p=106194>
>
> Posted on July 11, 2019 3:08 pm <https://electionlawblog.org/?p=106194>
> by *Rick Hasen* <https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
>
> President Trump’s Speech this afternoon in which he said that the
> Administration would give up on efforts to add a citizenship question to
> the census is a victory for the rule of law. Many people were predicting
> that Trump would use an Executive Order in an effort to force people in the
> Census Bureau to ignore multiple court orders which barred the inclusion of
> the question. I had been saying to wait and see, and fortunately, the
> Administration did not provoke a constitutional crisis by ignoring the
> judiciary and judicial review.
>
> This is the second victory for the rule of law. The first was that the
> Supreme Court, likely thanks to the Hofeller files,
> <https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/05/census-memo-supreme-court-conservatives-white-voters-alito.html> refused
> to go along with the charade that the government wanted to add the census
> question to help Hispanic voters in Voting Rights Act lawsuits. In fact, it
> was quite the opposite: it was an attempt to maximize, in Hofeller’s terms,
> white Republican voting power at the expense of Hispanics and Democrats.
> The pretext was too much for even Chief Justice Roberts to handle.
>
> Sure it is not all good news. Four Justices were willing to go along with
> this charade. Roberts’ majority opinion created an easy path for inclusion
> of the citizenship question in future decades, so long as the government
> learns to lie better. The government will still collect citizenship data to
> give Republican states a way to draw districts with equal numbers of voter
> eligible citizens <https://electionlawblog.org/?p=105998>, rather than
> all persons, thereby diminishing Hispanic (and Democratic) voting power.
> (The question of whether that is permissible will have to be decided by the
> Supreme Court, where the odds are good that drawing such discriminatory
> district would be allowed.) And attorney general William Barr further lied
> when he said that the Administration would have won its lawsuits, if only
> they had more time. (Not only would they have had a difficult time
> manufacturing a new pretext; the were amateurs in trying to fix things, and
> had no good explanation for why they could extend the deadline for printing
> after telling the Supreme Court it had to take the case on an expedited
> basis and skip the Court of Appeals given the time crunch.)
>
> So it is not all good news. But it is good news for the census (where the
> real work of getting people to answer the survey is just beginning, given
> all of the dirt Trump has thrown up in the air, and all the intimidation of
> non-citizens to participate).
>
> And it is good news for the rule of law. Even the Trump Administration
> listened to the courts. We shouldn’t lose sight of that significant victory.
>
> [image: Share]
> <https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=https%3A%2F%2Felectionlawblog.org%2F%3Fp%3D106194&title=The%20Trump%20(Second)%20Cave%20on%20the%20Citizenship%20Question%20is%20a%20Double%20Victory%20for%20the%20Rule%20of%20Law>
>
> Posted in census litigation <https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=125>, Supreme
> Court <https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=29>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
>
> Rick Hasen
>
> Chancellor's Professor of Law and Political Science
>
> UC Irvine School of Law
>
> 401 E. Peltason Dr., Suite 1000
>
> Irvine, CA 92697-8000
>
> 949.824.3072 - office
>
> rhasen at law.uci.edu
>
> http://www.law.uci.edu/faculty/full-time/hasen/
>
> http://electionlawblog.org
>
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-- 
Marty Lederman
Georgetown University Law Center
600 New Jersey Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20001
202-662-9937
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