Mark Joseph Stern at Slate has the birds-eye lowdown on another caper involving the newly Trumpified Supreme Court. (In Texas on Monday night, the president* admitted that he would never have a better record on appointing judges than George Washington, whose record he said was "100 percent." This happens to be, as usual, a non-fact.) You may have forgotten in all the noise that the administration* was planning to reintroduce a citizenship question on the 2020 Census. The Census is the province of the Department of Commerce, presently under the direction of Secretary Wilbur Ross, a man who once claimed to have misplaced two billion dollars.

A group of state attorneys general found all of this very suspicious and filed a lawsuit. Ross tried to fob the whole thing off on the Department of Justice. Back in July, a federal judge allowed the lawsuit to proceed, and, in doing so, announced that Ross's reasons for including the citizenship question were, at best, at variance with what the judge believed to be the truth. From Paul Waldman in The Washington Post:

In fact, the Commerce Department asked the Justice Department to make the request, in what seems an obvious attempt to provide the cover story that they could use from that point forward. We know this because as part of a lawsuit filed by multiple states to stop the addition of the citizenship question, emails have been obtained that show Ross and other Commerce officials stating exactly what they were doing...we now know that was a part of the cover story that Ross and others in the administration concocted to argue falsely that the citizenship question would be added only to satisfy the Trump Justice Department’s deep concern for enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.

We also learn from an April 2017 email that “Steve Bannon has asked that the Secretary talk to someone about the Census,” which further undercuts the administration’s cover story that 1) this only came up because of the December 2017 Justice Department request, and 2) that it’s all about getting an accurate count to aid enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.

In short, two departments of this administration* concocted a bogus story to add a bogus citizenship question to the census for purely political reasons as part of its overall plan to rig the immigration system in profoundly racist ways. And a federal judge caught them—and Ross, as well. Enter Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch.

DANIEL LEAL-OLIVAS Getty Images

On Monday, the Supreme Court blocked a deposition that Ross was scheduled to give as part of that lawsuit. (It allowed another deposition to go forward.) But, as Stern explains, Gorsuch wanted to go much further in deference to the current executive branch.

In a partial dissent, Gorsuch, joined by Thomas, wrote that he would have blocked both officials’ depositions, as well as any discovery beyond the record the Commerce Department already compiled. Gorsuch declared that the plaintiffs had failed to show the requisite evidence of bad faith to warrant expansive discovery...

Gorsuch conveniently leaves out Furman’s most critical finding: that Ross lied about his reasons for adding the citizenship question. Initially, Ross insisted—under oath before Congress—that he began considering the question in response to the DOJ’s request. A document obtained in discovery, however, reveals that Ross himself pushed the DOJ to submit this request, contradicting his earlier sworn testimony. Furman, quite sensibly, found that Ross’ dishonesty could indicate that his “proffered rationale for the decision … may have been pretextual.” He rested his decision to permit the depositions on that conclusion. Yet Gorsuch elided Ross’ falsehood, a sleight of hand that conveniently erases the heart of Furman’s ruling.

During his decade on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Gorsuch built his reputation as a skeptic of the “administrative state,” those executive branch agencies tasked with implementing federal law. He is an outspoken critic of the rule that courts should defer to these agencies’ reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes...Apparently not. Instead of sticking to his principles, Gorsuch is running interference for the Trump administration, urging the courts to let the administrative state misapply federal law and then suppress all evidence under the guise of privilege. That’s a disappointing departure from the justice’s legal philosophy—one that seems tailored to let Wilbur Ross sabotage the census in an effort to entrench Republican power for a decade.

Sooner or later, Camp Runamuck will close down for good. But that which the Republicans sold their collective souls to entrench will be with us for years. Given the same good fortune, every person on every stage in every Republican debate in 2016 would have run these same games—perhaps a touch more gracefully, but with every bit the same ideological determination. This is the long project. This is country they envision for all of us.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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