Thursday morning, the Supreme Court declined to decide if the U.S. census may ask respondents if they are U.S. citizens. The high court has temporarily sent the matter to lower courts for further consideration.
This punt by the Supreme Court is a short-term win for the Democrats. According to Fox News, the 2020 census ballots need to be printed “in a week or so,” so the citizenship question will probably not be on the 2020 census. This has a significant effect on the number of people who will be counted in California. Many illegal immigrants, it is believed, may not answer the census if they need to indicate their citizenship status. According to 2019 Pew Research data, California is home to 2.2 million of the country’s 10.7 million illegal immigrants, far more than any other state.
President Trump expressed his anger at this possibility: “Can you believe that the Radical Left Democrats want to do our new and very important Census Report without the all important Citizenship Question. Report would be meaningless and a waste of the billions that it costs to put together!” However, the “Radical Left Democrats” are not responsible for the court’s opinion today, which was unanimous in part.
According to Fox News, the majority stated, “We’re presented with an explanation for agency action that is incongruent with what the record reveals about the agency’s priorities and decision making process. It’s rare to review a record as extensive as the one before us when evaluating informal agency action … for the sufficient reasons we’ve explained, we cannot ignore the disconnect between the decision made [to add the citizenship question] and the explanation.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi praised the court’s ruling at a press conference Thursday morning.
“We have to make sure … that the American people come forward and be counted,” the California Democrat said. “It would be a sad occurrence if people said ‘well since that [question is] on there I’m not going to be counted.’ Because it means so much in terms of who we are as a nation, in terms of what makes up America, who are we … and by the way, how do we reapportion seats in the Congress of the United States so that people have representation that is justified by their numbers.”
However, this is not the massive victory for liberals that some left-wing organizations are making it out to be, either. After further consideration, the Supreme Court could later accept the justification for adding the citizenship question and rule that it is constitutional.
