WASHINGTON — In a pair of decisions with vast implications for the American political landscape, the Supreme Court on Thursday delivered a victory to Republicans by ruling that federal courts are powerless to hear challenges to extreme partisan gerrymandering but gave a reprieve to Democrats by delaying the Trump administration’s efforts to add a question on citizenship to the 2020 census.
The key parts of both decisions were decided by 5-to-4 votes.
In the gerrymandering case, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined his usual conservative allies. In the census case, he broke with them to vote with the court’s four-member liberal wing in preventing, for now, what advocates have argued would be a deterrent to immigrants from participating in the once-a-decade count.
[The Supreme Court’s rulings on gerrymandering and the census have profound implications for American politics. Here’s what the decisions mean.]
The gerrymandering decision was momentous, definitively closing the door on judicial challenges to voting maps warped by politics. The practice of redrawing the boundaries of voting districts is almost as old as the nation. Both parties have used it, but in recent years, Republicans have been the primary beneficiaries.
The drafters of the Constitution, Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority, understood that politics would play a role in drawing election districts when they gave the task to state legislatures. Judges, he said, are not entitled to second-guess lawmakers’ judgments.
“We conclude that partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts,” the chief justice wrote.
[Here’s what you need to know about gerrymandering.]
In an impassioned dissent delivered from the bench, Justice Elena Kagan said American democracy would suffer thanks to the court’s ruling in the two consolidated cases decided Thursday, Rucho v. Common Cause, No. 18-422, and Lamone v. Benisek, No. 18-726.
“The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government,” she said. “Part of the court’s role in that system is to defend its foundations. None is more important than free and fair elections.”
She added that she was dissenting with “deep sadness.” She was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor.
Chief Justice Roberts did not say the current system of drawing districts was desirable as a matter of policy. “Excessive partisanship in districting leads to results that reasonably seem unjust,” he wrote.
“The districting plans at issue here are highly partisan, by any measure,” he wrote. “The question is whether the courts below appropriately exercised judicial power when they found them unconstitutional as well.”
The answer, he wrote, is no, as courts lack the authority and competence to decide when politics has played too large a role in redistricting. “There are no legal standards discernible in the Constitution for making such judgments,” the chief justice wrote, “let alone limited and precise standards that are clear, manageable and politically neutral.”
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh joined the majority opinion.
In her dissent, Justice Kagan said the court had abdicated one of its most crucial responsibilities.
“The only way to understand the majority’s opinion,” she wrote, “is as follows: In the face of grievous harm to democratic governance and flagrant infringements on individuals’ rights — in the face of escalating partisan manipulation whose compatibility with this nation’s values and law no one defends — the majority declines to provide any remedy. For the first time in this nation’s history, the majority declares that it can do nothing about an acknowledged constitutional violation because it has searched high and low and cannot find a workable legal standard to apply.”
Chief Justice Roberts countered that his majority opinion was a modest one that recognized the limits of judicial power.
“No one can accuse this court of having a crabbed view of the reach of its competence,” he wrote. “But we have no commission to allocate political power and influence in the absence of a constitutional directive or legal standards to guide us in the exercise of such authority.”
Thursday’s second major ruling, on the census, may turn out to be less consequential. But it was nonetheless a striking setback for the Trump administration. Since 1950, the government has not included a question about citizenship in the forms sent to each household, but the administration was confident it would prevail before a court it views as generally sympathetic to its assertions of executive power.
But court rejected the administration’s stated reason for adding a question on citizenship to the census, leaving in doubt whether the question would appear on the forms sent to every household in the nation next year.
Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, said the administration’s explanation for adding the question “seems to have been contrived.” But he left open the possibility that it could provide an adequate answer.
Executive branch officials must “offer genuine justifications for important decisions, reasons that can be scrutinized by courts and the interested public,” the chief justice wrote. “Accepting contrived reasons would defeat the purpose of the enterprise. If judicial review is to be more than an empty ritual, it must demand something better than the explanation offered for the action taken in this case.”
The practical effect of the decision was not immediately clear. While the question is banned for now, it is at least possible that the administration will be able to offer adequate justifications for it. But time is short, as the census forms must be printed soon.
President Trump commented on Twitter, writing that he had “asked the lawyers if they can delay the Census, no matter how long, until the United States Supreme Court is given additional information from which it can make a final and decisive decision on this very critical matter.”
Thursday’s decision was fractured, but the key passage in the chief justice’s majority opinion was joined only by the court’s four-member liberal wing.
The census, the nation’s largest peacetime mobilization, is overseen by the Commerce Department. In March 2018, Wilbur Ross, the secretary of commerce, announced that he planned to add a citizenship question.
Chief Justice Roberts wrote that executive branch officials ordinarily had broad discretion to make policy judgments. But he said the record in the case demonstrated that Mr. Ross had not given a full and accurate account of his decision to add the question.
In sworn testimony before Congress, the secretary said he had decided to add the question “solely” in response to a Justice Department request in December 2017 for data to help it enforce the Voting Rights Act, or the V.R.A. Three federal trial judges have ruled that the evidence in the record demonstrated that Mr. Ross was not being truthful.
[Here’s what you need to know about the debate over adding a citizenship question to the census.]
Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the evidence in the case showed that “the V.R.A. played an insignificant role in the decision-making process.”
“The secretary,” he wrote, “was determined to reinstate a citizenship question from the time he entered office; instructed his staff to make it happen; waited while commerce officials explored whether another agency would request census-based citizenship data; subsequently contacted the attorney general himself to ask if D.O.J. would make the request; and adopted the Voting Rights Act rationale late in the process.”
“Altogether,” the chief justice wrote, “the evidence tells a story that does not match the explanation the secretary gave for his decision.”
The trial judge in the case had given the administration another chance to provide an explanation, and the Supreme Court affirmed that ruling.
“In these unusual circumstances,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “the district court was warranted in remanding to the agency, and we affirm that disposition.”
Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan joined the key part of the chief justice’s opinion.
In dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas said the majority had done something extraordinary. “For the first time ever,” he wrote, “the court invalidates an agency action solely because it questions the sincerity of the agency’s otherwise adequate rationale.”
Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh joined Justice Thomas’s partial dissent.
Justice Thomas said the consequences of the majority decision would be far-reaching. “Now that the court has opened up this avenue of attack,” he wrote, “opponents of executive actions have strong incentives to craft narratives that would derail them.”
Justice Alito filed his own partial dissent.
“To put the point bluntly,” he wrote, “the federal judiciary has no authority to stick its nose into the question whether it is good policy to include a citizenship question on the census or whether the reasons given by Secretary Ross for that decision were his only reasons or his real reasons.”
The case — United States Department of Commerce v. New York, No. 18-966 — has its roots in the text of the Constitution, which requires an “actual enumeration” every 10 years, with the House to be apportioned based on “the whole number of persons in each state.”
But the government has long used the census to gather information beyond raw population data. In 2020, for instance, the short form that goes to every household will include questions about sex, age, race and Hispanic or Latino origin. Some of those questions may discourage participation, too.
In announcing that he planned to add a citizenship question, Mr. Ross acknowledged that it could have “some impact on responses” but said the information sought was “of greater importance than any adverse effect that may result from people violating their legal duty to respond.”
Documents disclosed in the case showed that Mr. Ross had discussed the citizenship issue early in his tenure with Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House chief strategist and an architect of the Trump administration’s tough immigration policies, and that Mr. Ross had met at Mr. Bannon’s direction with Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state and an opponent of unlawful immigration.
After the justices heard arguments in April, more evidence emerged from the computer files of Thomas B. Hofeller, a Republican strategist. It suggested that the Trump administration sought to collect citizenship information so that states could draw voting districts by counting only eligible voters rather than all residents, as is the current practice. That would, Mr. Hofeller wrote, “be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.”
The administration has said that census forms must be printed by June, but the groups challenging the citizenship question said the real deadline is October, leaving time for further legal proceedings.
via The New York Times https://ift.tt/2RD9UrU
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