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WASHINGTON: The Supreme Court on Monday (November 30) will take up President Donald Trump’s controversial and unprecedented effort to exclude illegal immigrants from the population totals used to assign districts of the United States House of Representatives to states. .
Challengers to Trump’s July directive include several New York-led states, cities, counties and immigrant rights groups. They have argued that the Republican president’s move could leave several million people uncounted and cause California, Texas and New Jersey to lose House seats, which are based on a state’s population count in the decennial census.
The court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, including three Trump-appointed judges, is scheduled to hear an 80-minute oral argument by teleconference.
Trump lost his bid for reelection on November 3. This case centers on one of several political moves his administration is rushing to complete before Democratic President-elect Joe Biden takes office on January 20.
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The census mandated by the Constitution of the United States. The contenders argued that the text of the Constitution prohibits Trump from excluding illegal immigrants from the population count. The Constitution requires that the distribution of House seats be based on the “total number of people in each state.”
Challengers said Trump’s plan, undertaken as part of the government’s responsibility to administer the 2020 census, also violates a federal law called the Census Act that describes how a census should be conducted.
They said Trump’s plan would weaken the political power of states with the largest numbers of illegal immigrants, including heavily Democratic California, by discounting their true populations and depriving them of House seats. If California loses House districts, that would likely mean that Democrats would lose House seats, benefiting Trump’s fellow Republicans.
There are an estimated 11 million immigrants living illegally in the United States. Until now, the government’s practice was to count everyone regardless of citizenship or immigration status.
“That’s what everyone has always thought,” said Dale Ho, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents immigrant groups in the case.
Ho said he is optimistic that court conservatives, who often tout the importance of interpreting the laws as written, would see this as a “pretty easy case.”
Trump’s lawyers argued in court documents that the president acted within his authority and that the contenders lacked the necessary legal capacity to present the case. The Trump administration “has virtually unlimited discretion as to what data will be used to list individual persons in each state for census purposes and decennial distribution,” Acting Attorney General Jeff Wall wrote.
The court is deciding the case on an expedited schedule, with a ruling before the end of the year. That would make it difficult for the incoming Biden administration to review Trump’s plan if it sticks.
Trump’s hard-line stance on immigration has been a hallmark of his presidency.
Last year, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 against Trump’s effort to add a citizenship question to the census. Critics said the question was intended to scare immigrants out of the population count and artificially reduce the number of inhabitants in heavily Democratic areas, also to benefit Republicans.
Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts joined Liberal justices in that ruling. But the addition of Trump’s third appointee, Amy Coney Barrett, to the court changes its dynamics, as judges saw in action Wednesday in a case in which they endorsed Christian and Jewish houses of worship that defied the latest state restrictions. of New York in the new coronavirus. places.
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Roberts disagreed with the three court liberals, but Barrett’s vote for the religious groups was decisive.
LOWER COURTS BACK TO CHALLENGES
A three-judge panel in New York ruled against the administration in September in the current case and the judges agreed to take the appeal on October 16. The federal courts in California and Maryland have reached the same conclusion in other cases through a court in Washington. ruled for Trump.
By statute, the president must send a report to Congress in early January with the population of each of the states and their authorized number of House districts.
Once states are assigned their districts, they draw the boundaries of the districts themselves, which will be used first in the 2022 Congressional elections. The number of House seats for each state also determines how many votes that state gets. in the Electoral College, the system used to determine the winner of the presidential elections. In a closed election, one or two electoral votes could change the outcome.
The census itself does not collect data on a person’s citizenship or immigration status. The Trump administration would base its numbers on data collected elsewhere. The US Census Bureau, a spokesperson said, “will make public the methods used to provide statewide counts once we have them finalized.”
Thomas Wolf, an attorney with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, said it’s not yet clear whether the administration will even be able to come up with usable numbers.
“This is not the way a transparent constitutional democracy is supposed to be run,” Wolf added.
Ilya Somin, a professor at the Antonin Scalia School of Law at George Mason University in Virginia who filed a brief against Trump, said that while the challengers have a strong case, one wrinkle could be that some conservative justices take a broad view of presidential powers.
“We can’t be too definitive about what the judges will do with that,” Somin said.
