Oh, what irony. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, a famously NeverTrump justice who will move the logic any way he can with a mission to thwart President Trump, has joined the leftist bloc of the high court to rule against President Trump's decision to ask a Census 2020 question about respondents' citizenship. On sincerity grounds of all things, as Tom McArdle notes in this op-ed here. According to the New York Times:

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, said the explanation offered by the Trump administration for adding the question “appears to have been contrived.” But he left open the possibility that it could provide an adequate answer.

Executive branch officials must “offer genuine justifications for important decisions, reasons that can be scrutinized by courts and the interested public,” the chief justice wrote. “Accepting contrived reasons would defeat the purpose of the enterprise. If judicial review is to be more than an empty ritual, it must demand something better than the explanation offered for the action taken in this case.”

Based on McArdle's important piece, it's hard to think that Roberts is going to permit the question even if the Trump administration does come up with a "less contrived" reason for asking the question, given his record.

But on the grounds he is sincere, maybe the Trump administration ought to go more frontal in stating just why this question is necessary. Up until now, the Trump administration has been citing civil rights enforcement as its rationale while emails show that officials are more concerned about illegal immigration. The left has made a lot of hay on this, as if its motives were shady. But they're the ones playing the political game here, as I argued a few days ago here.

It's simple. Democrats themselves have politicized the Census for an unearned advantage in Congress and beyond. That's not fair to citizen voters and people have a right to know exactly what's going on, through hard numbers. Because what we are seeing is that Democrats are now filling congressional seats based on districts that show 9% voter turnout rates because so many residents are illegal immigrants with nominally no power to vote, but desperately dependent on free government services, making them an ideal constituency for unaccountable rule. It's certainly the story in California and we are now starting to see other blue states such as New York follow. Sizable numbers of Democrats are being elected on this creepy dictatorship model and wielding amazing PRI-style unchecked power from it. Is that a threat to democracy to all the other places that don't practice that? Absolutely, given that we have a national legislature. It makes sense to know for sure how many citizens there are out there if for nothing else, that the matter can be discussed.

This op-ed in The Hill by Ford O'Connell describes the emerging picture of how Democrats have benefited:

Thanks to the 14th Amendment, which dictates the mechanics of how the president is elected, as well as the Supreme Court’s ruling in Evenwell v. Abbott, Democrats are using illegal immigration to alter the balance of power in the Electoral College from rural, Republican-leaning states to those that are predominately blue and in some cases purple. A quick glance at the 20 metro areas with the largest number of illegal aliens confirms this.

No, illegal immigrants aren’t allowed to directly vote for the commander-in-chief yet, but in vast numbers they can dramatically alter the Electoral College to favor Democrats for at least a decade because a state’s electoral votes are based on the number of people residing within that state, not the number of citizens present when the Decennial Census is taken.

And why stop there? Democrats are also gaining seats based on illegally cast votes of non-citizens, too (and it's a widespread problem with a credible estimate from FAIR of 1.6 million illegally cast votes, a number that could easily affect election outcomes in many races. With leftist secretaries of state such as California's Alex Padilla running voter registrations through the DMV and taking citizenship declarations on an "honor system," it's very easy now.) Democrats have been finding utility in non-citizens not just in their illegally cast votes as well, but also for the purpose of ballot-harvesting, a practice fraught with potential for abuse, whether in muscling unwilling and unqualified voters into casting ballots by coming to them in their homes and letting them know they know where they live, or else by cherry-picking ballots handed to them by those unwilling to go to the polls and either filling them out  or else tossing the "wrong" ones into the trash instead of placing them into ballot boxes.

Foreign votes? Foreign interference in our election? If these things aren't evidence of that, what is? Citizenship is very important to have data on, given the gaming we see going on in so many different directions.

What's needed now is some serious hard data about this matter, how many citizens we have, how many non-citizens we have, how many people are we counting twice, whether we should have a debate on the representation of foreigners in the country illegally and whether Democrats are benefiting from it. We need sunlight, something that could be provided by the Census as legal residents could easily be subtracted from the non-citizen total and a real count on the scope of illegal immigration and illegal voting can be tallied. Somehow, Democrats don't want that information to be known. Why are they against anyone having this information, which of course they would be entitled to have too? What are they afraid of? Might their political gaming of the system be subject to some serious scrutiny? Might it be because they now thrive on a non-citizen vote? At a minimum, there ought to be a conversation about it, with facts to work with.

The Trump administration has thus far put out an argument about interest in enforcing the Civil Rights Act which doesn't quite address what's going on in the problem with the migrant surge or the Democrat opportunism from it, and there have been emails obtained by leftwing activists showing that yes, this is about illegal immigration.

Maybe Roberts is sincere about wanting the real reason for this Census reasoning to be deliberated upon. If so, the Trump administration ought to embrace it, and go full frontal because foreigners are now determining our electoral outcomes. They are being counted two or three times and citizens are indeed being disenfranchised as illegal cancel their votes out. If the Trump administration loses and Roberts cooks up some new phony excuse not to permit the question, there may be an outcry about why we aren't permitted to know just how many citizens are in this country -- which may galvanize changes in the legislature and beyond. At a minimum, Trump will go down with honor on the record for knowing that citizenship matters, rule of law matters, and the people's right to know matters. Roberts will be the one who has a problem with sunlight and even more ironically, actual rule of law.

Image credit: Montage by Monica Showalter from public domain sources.