The Republican Supreme Court Ends the Census Early

Dictators thru the centuries

The US supreme court has just ruled that the president can end consensus counting early. That has been a major conservative goal in its attempt to not count minorities and illegal residents. NPR reports:

“The Trump administration can end counting for the 2020 census after the Supreme Court approved a request for now to suspend a lower court order that extended the count's schedule.

The high court's ruling, following an emergency request the Justice Department made last week, is the latest turn in a roller coaster of a legal fight over the timeline for the count.

Last-minute changes by the Census Bureau and its skirting of an earlier court order for the count have left local communities and the bureau's workers across the U.S. unsure of how much longer they can take part in a national head count already upended by the coronavirus pandemic.

Lower courts previously ordered the administration to keep counting through Oct. 31, reverting to an extended schedule that Trump officials had first proposed in April in response to delays caused by the pandemic and then abruptly decided to abandon in July.  

More time, judges have ruled, would give the bureau a better chance of getting an accurate and complete count of the country's residents, which is used to determine how political representation and federal funding are distributed among the states over the next decade. 

Despite the Constitution's requirement to include the "whole number of persons in each state" and the president's limited authority over the census, Trump wants to try to exclude unauthorized immigrants from those numbers. That effort has sparked another legal fight that is also before the Supreme Court.”

The point is obvious: Conservative republicans and probably bigoted or racist authoritarian religious and business interests want to limit counting of minorities. The logic is that by undercounting all US residents, that will favor republicans. For the GOP leadership and Trump, this is about the exercise of power, not democratic governance.