Once again, Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues are poised to hand the Trump administration a decisive legal victory on dubious factual grounds. During oral arguments on Tuesday, the justices appeared to favor the administration’s dishonest defense of its attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census. A win for Trump could have serious consequences for the census’ accuracy, and for the near future of American democracy.



It’s unrealistic to expect anyone to agree with all or even most of the Supreme Court’s major rulings. What Americans should be able to expect is that the decisions will at least be grounded in reality and coherent logic. As in other recent cases, the justices on Tuesday instead tried to craft an alternate set of circumstances in which their eventual decision would make sense, rather than applying the law to the facts at hand.

The case, Department of Commerce v. New York, is perhaps the most consequential dispute on the court’s docket this term. The Constitution requires the federal government to count every person in the United States every ten years in order to determine how many House members each state gets to elect. State legislatures also use the data to apportion their own legislatures. What’s more, census statistics are used by cities, counties, states, and Congress to decide where and how to allocate billions in government funds.

Though the government asked about citizenship when it conducted the census in the past, it abandoned the practice in the 1950s. Census Bureau statisticians estimated that reinstituting the question today would prompt millions of respondents to avoid participating. “That has been proven in study after study,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted on Tuesday. “One census surveyor described an incident where he walked into a home, started asking citizenship, and the person stopped and left his home, leaving the census surveyor sitting there.” A citizenship question would be to the detriment, specifically, of communities with a higher share of non-citizens—which may well be the Trump administration’s intent, given its undisguised hostility toward immigrants.



The administration can’t get its own defense straight. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, whose department oversees the Census Bureau, claimed that he added the citizenship question at the request of the Justice Department, which said it would use the data to enforce part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Ross’s emails from 2017 later showed, however, that he asked Justice Department officials to make the formal request to justify a decision he’d already made. At the same time, Census Bureau officials urged Ross not to add the question because of its potentially deleterious impact.