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#ELB: “Supreme Court conservatives sympathetic toward Trump census citizenship query” electionlawblog.org/?p=104808
Looks like CJ Roberts is accepting the pretextual excuse that the citizenship question on the census is necessary to enforce the Voting Rights Act. (It's not). So it's the ideological Roberts, not the institutional Roberts showing up here @Slate slate.com/news-and-polit…
By the way, here's how many Voting Rights Act section 2 cases the Trump DOJ has brought where it might rely upon citizenship data:
0
0
This is one of those cases where the absence of a true centrist, pragmatist Justice like Anthony Kennedy or Sandra Day O'Connor would really matter.
As others have pointed out, you put a census ruling together with the travel ban case and you see a conservative #SCOTUS majority willing to take completely pretextual reasons for the government doing things at face value despite uncontradicted evidence of animus/bad motives
I have now read the transcript. Certainly seems like it is going 5-4, though Roberts asked fewer questions than I expected and didn't totally embrace the other side. I wouldn't bet on Roberts, though, to be the 5th vote with liberals to keep the citizenship question off census.
