Roberts Helps Dems Rig Elections

With the amount of information the U.S. Census gathers every decade, it seems logical that one of the questions asked would be simply, “Are you a citizen of the United States?” Yet the very idea of asking this simple “yes” or “no” question outraged the Left — which is in a headlong rush to offer free stuff to anyone who arrives. And leftists found a judge and a Supreme Court willing to stop the Trump administration from adding this longstanding question back into the 2020 census.

While conventional wisdom held that SCOTUS would grant the administration’s request, the Left’s Hail Mary pass was the unearthing of an unreleased report penned by a now-deceased GOP consultant claiming the citizenship question could assist Republican candidates. Leftists struck pay dirt when a Barack Obama-appointed judge deemed that what’s become known as the Hofeller files — discovered and released by the estranged daughter of the late consultant Thomas Hofeller, who died last year — “raises a substantial issue” regarding the Trump administration’s claim that the question would assist in enforcing the Voting Rights Act. Opponents of the question contend that adding it would reduce responses from minorities despite the fact that citizens are required by law to do so.

As speculated here earlier this month, the ever-capricious Chief Justice John Roberts was the one handed Democrats a victory with another of his weirdly contorted decisions. He aided the Left in at least temporarily blocking the question, which Roberts said was valid but that the Trump administration “did not provide adequate reasoning” for its inclusion.

As The Wall Street Journal explains, “The question in Department of Commerce v. New York was whether Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross acted within his purview in reinstating a citizenship question on the 2020 census.

That’s not the question the Court ended up deciding. Instead, the Chief held that, although Mr. Ross acted lawfully, his motives appear to have been less-than-pure.”

In other words, Roberts’s decision had to do with process and motives, not the Constitution.

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