A leftist San Francisco–based federal judge has gone the last federal judge one better and declared commerce secretary Wilbur Ross's request for a citizenship question on the coming 2020 Census form "unconstitutional."  The judge said just the asking of it amounted to "bad faith," and as the Washington Post reported, merely asking that "broke the law."

The administration has been on the losing end of scores of court decisions involving immigration issues since President Trump took office.  But the census case has taken on special significance because it strikes at the heart of the United States' form of government and because of what Seeborg described as a "strong showing of bad faith" by a Cabinet secretary who, influenced in part by White House advisers, tried to conceal his motives.

The cases against Ross have been brought by jurisdictions with significant immigrant populations.  Only two have completed trials, the case heard by Furman and brought by 18 states led by New York, and today's challenge, initiated by the state of California and combined with a suit brought by the city of San Jose.

The judge's reasoning wasn't some law that says you can't ask a citizenship question, but his own interpretations of Ross's motive.

Seeborg, like Furman, found after a trial that Ross misrepresented both to the public and Congress his reasons for adding the citizenship question last March.  Ross claimed he was acting at the request of the Justice Department in the interest of enforcing the Voting Rights Act.

In reality, the "evidence establishes" that the voting rights explanation was just "a pretext" and that Ross "acted in bad faith" when he claimed otherwise.

He pursued the citizenship question after hearing from then-White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon and Kris Kobach, the vice chair of Trump's now-disbanded voting fraud commission.

Here's the reality: motive is irrelevant.  What Ross said he wanted is one thing; he probably should have been more direct.  But the right to know isn't irrelevant.  And all that's being asked for in that Census questionnaire is information — information that every resident is legally bound to answer.  The argument presented from the Left is that illegal aliens won't answer the Census if a citizenship question is on it, and they must be accommodated.  Yet not answering is exactly what's breaking the law, not the question.  Illegals have already broken immigration law by entering the U.S. illegally, setting up shop, having citizen children, and taking jobs.  Many have stolen Americans' identification either to steal money or to pursue work.  The fact that illegals are likely to display the same lawless attitude on the matter of answering the Census just illustrates the chain of lawlessness surrounding illegal immigration.  In squelching the citizenship question, the judge is ruling that the Census should actually accommodate them, not the rest of us, and not the right to know.

What's happening here is something that does need to be discussed in our representative democracy.  Should congressional seats, all of which are allotted in approximately 300,000-sized population blocs, include seats where the majority of the residents are non-citizens?  Democrats are actually sending congressional representatives to Congress based on this dynamic in California, where many of the most powerful congressmen and state assembly members have 9% to 10% voter turnout rates, owing to the gargantuan size of the illegal populations represented.  Buttressed by the numbers (but not the votes) that create those districts, they go on to make decisions in Congress with the exact same power as congressmen representing legitimate citizen districts, for the rest of us.  Foreign influence?  You bet.

Here's another thing: the populations in the districts is key to determining how many electoral college votes are allotted per state.  California has a huge number, inflated by the large presence of illegal residents.  Better still, all of the blue counties cancel out the votes of all of the red counties in the allotment of delegates.  Foreigners ruling us?  You bet.

Any questions why Democrats want every illegal they can get across our unprotected border?  Their entire basis of power, that little edge that puts them over the top in every election in California, is built on foreign nationals, not U.S. citizens.  It's hardly different from a foreign army coming in and taking over.

Yet all the Census question seeks is mere information so that the matter can be discussed, and it gets this blast of overkill from the judge.  Note that the Census asks all kinds of intrusive questions — from income to race to whether you moved to education to emergency preparedness to whether you actually voted.  But it asks nothing about citizenship, and it's putting out a $500-million "communications campaign" to beef up numbers of respondents.  Its allies in the GAO have even put out a map of the Census intentions in the form of a big blue-state America.  That, along with its uncooperative attitude to Ross himself, suggests there's going to be some numbers-gaming to help Democratic seat counts in this 2020 Census.

Information.  Ross just wants some information.  The judge's rabid squelching of that is nothing but a bid to keep that information from getting out in the name of helping Democrats retain power.  Should California be determining who should be U.S. president based on the strength of its foreign — and illegally present — population?  That's what this dishonest ruling is really about.  While it wouldn't hurt Ross to be more direct about it, it's what the rest of us want to know and, frankly, have a right to know.