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Originally Posted by spence
Anyone here pondering why the conservative SCOTUS ruled against the question if it's so freaking obvious?
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There's nothing to ponder. It was a stupid decision. Worse, it further threatens our supposed separation of powers. The question should be does the executive branch have the power to place a question on the census, and is the question somehow unconstitutional.
The Chief Justice, who ruled against the citizenship question, said that it was not substantively invalid--that is, it was not unconstitutional. But he ruled on some notion of reasonableness or conflicting motivation. When Judges take on the power of deciding whether a law is "reasonable," or is invalid because stated reasons which in themselves are not unconstitutional seem to conflict, rather than if the law is constitutional, they're assuming legislative power instead of the judicial power to determine constitutionality.
I agree with Justice Thomas in his dissent "For the first time ever, the court invalidates an agency action solely because it questions the sincerity of the agency's otherwise adequate rationale."
"This conclusion is extraordinary," he wrote. "The court engages in an unauthorized inquiry into evidence not properly before us to reach an unsupported conclusion."
The idiocy of the ruling is represented by Breyer's usual spacey, irrelevancy--"In short, the secretary's decision to add a citizenship question created a severe risk of harmful consequences, yet he did not adequately consider whether the question was necessary or whether it was an appropriate means of achieving his stated goal," Again, where is the issue of constitutionality in Breyer's opinion? He rules strictly on his personal opinion about an unsupported, conjectured, and irrelevent supposed severe risk or if, in his opinion, the question was necessary or appropriate?