This is nice:
The Trump administration cannot put a question about citizenship status on the 2020 census, a federal judge in New York ruled Friday in a boost to proponents of counting immigrants.
In a 277-page decision that won’t be the final word on the issue, U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman ruled that while such a question would be constitutional, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross had moved to add it to the census arbitrarily and had not followed proper administrative procedures.
“He failed to consider several important aspects of the problem; alternately ignored, cherry-picked, or badly misconstrued the evidence in the record before him; acted irrationally both in light of that evidence and his own stated decisional criteria; and failed to justify significant departures from past policies and practices,” Furman wrote.
Among other things, the judge said, Ross didn’t follow a law requiring that he give Congress three years notice of any plan to add a question about citizenship to the census.
Honestly, despite all the other mendacious reasons, shouldn’t the only thing that really matter be the fact that he ignored the law?
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
Well, yeah, that he ignored the law should be enough, but he works for Dear Leader, and if there’s one thing we’ve learned from Dear Leader, it’s that laws are mean and unfair.
The Moar You Know
Not the decision I wanted at all. The question is OK, putting it in the census is OK. The process was wrong. I would have vastly preferred that the question itself be ruled the problem.
Humdog
This is good news, for today and for the sake of the future.
What has a bee in my bonnet is well connected jack asses are able to call the Treasury Sec.up and say, “real estate loans aren’t able to run smoothly enough since the shutdown doesn’t allow us to check with the IRS to verify income. This is an essential service of government, to me, rich bank lender, so could you change things so the IRS staff who work on my behalf are not furloughed?” In one day, Mnunchin served his paymasters and got those IRS workers back to work. They are essential, but keeping our FBI paid up so they don’t get in financial difficulties and lose their security clearances, or ATC paid or HUD rent support paid are not? Who you know in govt shouldn’t decide who gets considered essential. They are picking and choosing which parts of govt to run according to who knows whom or whose goose gets cooked. It is so blatantly corrupt and Rs and the media are all, this is fine! Sorry, rant over.
sharl
LOL
Mike R
To this crowd they aren’t laws, they are inconveniences.
Barbara
@The Moar You Know: I don’t see how the court could have done that. You might have liked that better as a legal doctrine, but that would have required a constitutional objection, and federal courts do not consider constitutional issues unless they are required to — if there is a statutory or procedural basis for overturning the law, then they will address that infirmity and save the constitutional issues for the future when/if it becomes necessary to address them. That’s for all kinds of issues, not just this one.
MattF
@Humdog: But… but… the FBI’s job includes domestic counter-intelligence… and you know where that could lead…
Racer X
“He failed to consider several important aspects of the problem; alternately ignored, cherry-picked, or badly misconstrued the evidence in the record before him; acted irrationally both in light of that evidence and his own stated decisional criteria; and failed to justify significant departures from past policies and practices,” Furman wrote.
Suggest we save this quote, as it seems to me it can be applied to almost every GOP policy…
Ken
So unless Obama loans his time machine to Trump, the question can’t go on the 2020 census since they didn’t ask Congress for permission in 2017?
Adam L Silverman
@Humdog: Actually, the folks Mnuchin put back to work are also not getting paid until the shutdown ends. Like the essential personnel at the FBI, they are working without pay until the shutdown ends.
Chief Oshkosh
@Humdog:
You are absolutely correct, though, so please rant on! The only reason any of these shutdowns occur for more than 24 hours is that they are selective shutdowns, with almost no real follow-up by the press.
David Hunt
@Ken:
They could keep appealing the obviously correct decision until they get to the Supreme Court. The current majority on SCOTUS seems to have, at best, no problem with various schemes that are meant to achieve vote suppression. I suspect that that may be one reason the judge kept hammer in all the ways that the question shouldn’t be on the Census.
Immanentize
@The Moar You Know: @Barbara:
Moar’s ruling could be had like this:
The constitution requires one thing, an accurate count of all people living under the powers of the federal government. From it’s earliest days the census clause of the constitution was understood to include the accurate count of everyone — including woman, children, men with no land, indentured servants, slaves, immigrants and Native Americans — all groups that could not vote. The constitutional mandate is accuracy of the count. Any change that might negatively impact the accuracy of the vote must be considered unconstitutional, whatever the purported reason.
Quinerly
We really need a Barr confirmation hearing thread, don’t we?
West of the Rockies
@David Hunt:
It does appear that the census issue may find its was to the SCOTUS. Perhaps Roberts, fearing for his legacy will side with the libs.
rikyrah
YEAH!!!
Good news
Barry
@Chief Oshkosh: And this is dangerous; the path which Trump/McConnel are on clearly leads to zeroing-out the government, with the President then deciding which departments/offices to turn back on, and to what extent.
A 100% violation of Congress’ ‘power of the purse’.
Humdog
@Adam L Silverman: I understand the mortgage checkers are getting paid but the tax refunders are not. Sitting in the same building but some are paid and some are not. Great employee relations!
Anonymous At Work
The factual findings made by the judge, plus Democratic oversight of Ross’s many many many Conflicts of Interest (if not outright perjuries), will keep this off the 2020 Census. There won’t be enough time to process all the appeals and start the process over in a way that conforms with Administrative Procedures Act.
I hope.
laura
@Chief Oshkosh: I concede to no one my visceral hatred of government as vending machine! So, please, rant on fellow citizen/customer.
rikyrah
“I never worked for Russia”
We have entered the point in our experiment where Traitor Donald Trump has to avow that he, in fact, is no traitor.
This avowal stands in stark contrast to the reporting that came out this weekend. We all know about the New York Times story which broke news that the FBI initiated a counterintelligence investigation into Trump after he fired Director James Comey. Then on Saturday the Washington Post reported that Trump confiscated the notes of the interpreter present in his meeting in Helsinki with Vladimir Putin.
Never in the history of the Republic have we had a man in office who has had to say that he’s never worked for a foreign government. We’ve had great presidents, mediocre presidents, and disastrous ones. But Trump is on another plane of reality.
……………………..
The fact is, it’s not only Trump. We have the fact that Russia funneled money to the NRA, which then funneled it to GOP politicians. The entire Republican Party is ensnared in the Russia scandal, not just its head. We have a major political party in this country which is in bed with a foreign power. This is a situation the country has never faced.
Everything about the times through which we’re living is unprecedented. A relatively weak power is using spycraft to destabilize the world’s only superpower, with alarming success. It has found enthusiastic stooges by stoking racial and cultural animus. It has exploited known weaknesses in America’s political structure to install a puppet president. “The Manchurian Candidate” was off by a few decades, and Trump didn’t even have to be brainwashed. Where we go from here is anybody’s guess.
Burnspbesq
@Racer X:
The passage you quoted is a pretty good synopsis of about 40 years of Supreme Court case law under the Administrarive Procedure Act. The district judge is trying to appeal-proof his decision.
Face
What did you expect? Does the Constitution specifically describe what the Census can say? I dont believe it does. So literally anything they want to add to the Census is “constitutional”, by strict definition. To safeguard against crazy shit, they’ve placed Congress in the approval mix to weed out such bullshit.
So of course the question of citizenship is “OK”, because pretty much anything is “legal”, as long as Congress signs off on it. But Ross sidestepped Congress, hence the process was shortcircuited and ruled to be a somethingburger.
Uncle Omar
Wilbur should just go back to stealing money from investors and other suckers–though in his case the two fields are congruent–which seems to be where he got his ideas concerning “legality.”
Barbara
@Immanentize: Well, he can certainly relate what the Constitution says about the Census, but there is a law that seems to have been been facially violated (three years notice). A secondary issue is failing to abide by the NPRM requirements, and a third is acting to overturn a prior rule in an arbitrary and capricious manner. All of that is going to make the rest of your analysis unnecessary, meaning, courts aren’t supposed to go there until they have to. Doing other than that will make his opinion more vulnerable to scrutiny on appeal.
Immanentize
@Barbara: I know and I agree with the judge’s approach — it is heavily fact finding based and the appellate courts can’t (usually) overturn district courts’ findings of fact. I was just answering how a court could strike down the added question as unconstitutional as applied.
catclub
@Humdog:
my understanding would be: the mortgage checkers are essential staff and have to come to work, but they still don’t get paid.
The tax refunders are not considered essential and so do not work.
Essential is just like the uniformed Coast Guard. They are on the ships but getting no paychecks.
laura
@Burnspbesq: Can I get a synopsis of Chevron?
Scuttles away chortling…….
Interstadial
@Barbara: The decision’s references to “arbitrary and capricious” and violations of procedural requirements relate to the Administrative Procedures Act of 1946 (APA) which sets out requirements for decisions by federal agencies. The APA is the primary reason that the current administration was unable to just immediately overturn a bunch of Obama administration rules upon taking office. Instead, they first had to go through the public rule-making process which takes a fair amount of time and effort.
Francis
@The Moar You Know: You have to go deep into the opinion, but the Judge does indirectly point out that getting the question lawfully on the census would be very difficult in light of the substantive law on the census. The Trump administration’s problem is that they came nowhere close to following their obligations to add the question. In light of the massive procedural defects I’m not surprised that the judge didn’t feel the need to directly resolve the question of whether the question could be added at all in light of governing law.
low-tech cyclist
@The Moar You Know:
One thing I learned in my now-distant life as a mathematician is that it’s easier to prove a narrow claim than a sweeping theorem. You may wish the sweeping theorem was true, but if you claim it’s true and can’t back it up with a proof, your doctoral advisor is going to lose his patience with you. So you learn that your theorems have to be solid – that you’ve proven the whole of what you’ve claimed to be true, and there are no holes in the proof – and then you can defend your dissertation.
ISTM that this isn’t all that different. The judge is only making those assertions he can back up with as close to an undefeatable argument as one can manage in the legal world. Like Burnspbesq says, he’s trying to ensure that his decision is appeal-proof, that there aren’t errors in his decision that can be overturned by a higher court.
If his argument rested on too wide and sweeping a claim, his argument would fail. He surely concluded that to claim unconstitutionality was a broader claim than he could defend, and he didn’t want his entire decision overturned because either the Justice Department lawyers or the Circuit Court judges poked holes in his reasoning,
Anyone have any idea what law the judge was referring to?
It seems like a good law. You wouldn’t want the Executive Branch to be able to mess with the Census questions without allowing plenty of time for Congressional input. And requiring a three-year lead time would require that at least two Congresses have the opportunity to review the changes, and would often involve more than one Presidential administration as well.