After last week’s decision in Department of Commerce v. New York, in which the Supreme Court blocked the Trump administration’s plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, the government announced yesterday that it is printing the census forms without the question. Amy Howe has this blog’s coverage, which first appeared at Howe on the Court. Jess Bravin and Janet Ademy report for The Wall Street Journal that “[t]he decision to stop pursuing the citizenship question was made just hours before it became public.” For The New York Times, Michael Wines describes the decision as “a victory for critics who said the question was part of an administration effort to skew the census results in favor of Republicans,” and “a remarkable retreat for an administration that typically digs into such fights.”
At CNN, Joan Biskupic writes that Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion blocking the citizenship question “echoed his surprise affirmation of the Affordable Care Act in 2012”; she suggests “that the 5-4 census case and other moves in the recently completed session demonstrated Roberts’ new variability in fraught cases.” At FiveThirtyEight, Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux explains that, “[b]ased on how they have ruled this year, there are now three justices who could reasonably be seen as ‘swing’ votes of one kind or another: Roberts, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch,” concluding that “the lack of a single ‘swing’ justice may have created new opportunities for the court’s liberal minority to forge alliances with the conservatives.” The editorial board of the Los Angeles Times assesses “whether [the justices] safeguarded the court’s independence from partisan politics, as well as the perception of its independence” this term, and gives the court “a passing grade.”
At Take Care, Danny Wilf-Townsend weighs in on last week’s decision in Rucho v. Common Cause, in which the court held that partisan-gerrymandering challenges to electoral maps are political questions that are not reviewable in court, arguing that, “[t]o adapt the Chief Justice’s famous metaphor, Rucho is like an umpire who, saying the strike zone cannot be administered fairly, decides to let whichever team is winning call the balls and strikes.” Additional commentary comes from LeRoy Goldman at his eponymous blog.
At his eponymous blog, William Goren unpacks the various opinions in Kisor v. Wilkie, in which the court reaffirmed, but narrowed, precedent holding that courts should defer to an administrative agency’s reasonable interpretation of its own genuinely ambiguous regulations. At Covington’s Inside Energy & Environment blog, Thomas Brugato and Brandon Rattiner explain that the decision “will have significant ramifications for the Environmental Protection Agency … and environmental law.” In an op-ed for the Washington Examiner, Ashley Baker calls Kisor “an important step toward reining in the largely unaccountable and ever-expanding administrative state.”
Briefly:
We rely on our readers to send us links for our round-up. If you have or know of a recent (published in the last two or three days) article, post, podcast or op-ed relating to the Supreme Court that you’d like us to consider for inclusion in the round-up, please send it to roundup [at] scotusblog.com. Thank you!
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY