The Roberts Court Is Considering the Legal Reasoning of Jim Crow to Uphold a Rigged Census
There’s an odious Supreme Court case from 1971, Palmer v. Thompson, that most people don’t remember and that most who do remember wish they could forget. It’s a relic of a bygone era—one of the last pieces of the Jim Crow system that the Supreme Court ever sustained.
On our current Supreme Court, Palmer v. Thompson looks to be having a moment. Its reasoning stealthily drove last year’s decision in Trump v. Hawaii, in which the court’s five-justice conservative majority upheld the travel restrictions that the president had planned during the campaign to be a “Muslim ban.” And this week’s oral arguments in the census case suggest that four of the conservative justices who upheld that pretextual ban—and the fifth conservative who replaced Anthony Kennedy—are poised to use the reasoning of both Palmer and that travel ban decision to endorse the administration’s tactic of forcing people to reveal their citizenship status if they simply want to be counted as present in the country.
How could a late-stage Jim Crow decision be wreaking such havoc in the 21st century?
Now, improbably, Palmer v. Thompson is back.
Consider this week’s oral argument in the census case, Department of Commerce v. New York. The census has many uses, but the most important—the one listed in the Constitution—is the “actual enumeration” of all the people in the country. The census tally drives legislative apportionment, and legislative apportionment drives our democracy. Getting the numbers right is crucial because the tally is enduring. The count won’t happen again for a decade.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/04/john-roberts-supreme-court-census-jim-crow-muslim-ban.html