Let’s start the census question discussion with one point.
The topic was never a legitimate subject for scrutiny by courts. We’ve had a citizenship question in the past. The particular lefty tactic of constantly litigating the administration’s motives on decisions that had been carried out in the past with no fuss is wholly inappropriate.
Justice Roberts, instead of rejecting this line of attack, affirmed it.
But that’s not surprising because Justice Roberts will do the right thing a lot of the time, but not when the pressure is high enough. When lefties really make something a priority, or his own social views interfere, he defects to the other side.
Even lefties though their census legal attack was remarkably weak. But no matter how weak the legal reasoning is, Justice Roberts can be expected to back lefties on the truly big and high pressure decisions.
This was one of them.
Roberts joined great legal minds like Kagan, Sotomayor, Ginsburg and Breyer in trying to psychoanalyze the true basis for the census question. The basis for the question however has no relevance. The legal standing of it is the same unless there is clear evidence of an agenda that the court has an actual right to challenge. That’s not the case here. The campaign against Ross is a fishing expedition meant to block the appearance of the question.
By reaching his decision, Roberts has quite possibly blocked the appearance of the question. And that settles the issue.
It’s a betrayal, but one conservatives have learned to expect.
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