Meanwhile in the Trump Court

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.

[...]

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.

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 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.

[...]

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.

  Charles P Pierce

I wish I could be as sure this administration will pass in time.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.