Federal Court To Examine Clear Evidence That Trump’s Census Manipulation Violated the 14th Amendment

Today is the sixth anniversary of one of the very worst decisions in the long and largely ignoble history of the Supreme Court of the United States. Appropriately, the 4th Circuit is allowing Judge Hazel to consider the smoking gun evidence that the Trump administration added a citizenship question to the census for discriminatory purposes:

This last-minute development centers around information found on the files of Thomas Hofeller, the GOP’s former gerrymandering guru. When he died last year, Hofeller left behind a trove of materials that his estranged daughter turned over to voting rights advocates. Among other things, these files suggested that Justice Department officials worked with Hofeller to devise a pretextual justification for the census citizenship question, asserting that it would aid enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. This pretext was meant to conceal the real reason for the question: It could, Hofeller explained, substantially reduce the voting power of Democrats and Hispanics while boosting that of “Republicans and non-Hispanic Whites.”

he new materials also provide a direct link between Hofeller—who, evidence shows, devised the false justification—and the Census Bureau. They seem to further demonstrate that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross lied when he provided his rationale for the insertion of a citizenship question into the 2020 census. Plaintiffs argued that this evidence ties Hofeller’s work, which lays out the racist impact of a citizenship question, directly to the Trump administration. By doing so, they claim, it proves the question is motivated by unlawful animus.

Responding to these bombshells, U.S. District Judge George Hazel reopened the case on Monday. Hazel had initially determined that the question’s addition violated the Administrative Procedure Act and the Constitution’s enumeration clause but did not find proof of discriminatory intent in violation of equal protection. He wrote on Monday that the new evidence, by contrast, “potentially connects the dots between a discriminatory purpose—diluting Hispanics’ political power—and Secretary Ross’s decision.” It is, he wrote, “becoming difficult to avoid seeing that which is increasingly clear. As more puzzle pieces are placed on the mat, a disturbing picture of the decisionmakers’ motives takes shape.” And on Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4^th Circuit ruled that Hazel may examine the new evidence and decide whether it proves the question is illegally discriminatory.

The Supreme Court, of course, is currently assessing the legality of the question and will almost certainly issue a ruling later this week. But the court is set to resolve just two disputes: whether the citizenship question was added in an “arbitrary and capricious” manner under the Administrative Procedure Act, and whether it will impermissibly warp results in violation of the Constitution’s enumeration clause. It is not set to decide whether the question infringes upon equal protection or constitutes an unlawful conspiracy to suppress civil rights.

If Hazel decides that the question does run afoul of equal protection and civil rights, he can block the question again. In fact, 4^th Circuit Judge James A. Wynn wrote a concurrence to Tuesday’s decision advising Hazel to block the question preemptively while he contemplates his ruling. (Wynn speculated that the government will otherwise attempt to print the census forms quickly and claim the case is mooted.) There is a strong possibility, then, that SCOTUS will authorize the question this week and Hazel will block it on different grounds shortly thereafter.

If, following a Supreme Court opinion willfully ignoring the procedural illegalities of adding the census question, Hazel enjoins the question again will it hold up? Almost certainly not; the Roberts Court will be even less sympathetic to upholding a 14th Amendment claim (“it is unpossible for a Republican politician to act with racist motives” being a core principle of neoconfederate jurisprudence.) But, at worst, it’s would be good to have the evidence that the Trump administration acted with discriminatory intent and Donald Trump’s Supreme Court ignoring it yet again on the record.