TheFrontPageCover
~ Featuring ~
Another Judicial Roadblock to
Census Citizenship Question
Nate Jackson
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Trump’s Citizenship Question Isn’t Controversial
scumbag/liar-nObama Deleting It Should’ve Been
By Ian Miles Cheong
{ humanevents.com } ~ President Trump’s citizenship question on the upcoming U.S. census is, contrary to popular opinion, the norm for the decennial survey... Barack scumbag/liar-nObama was the first President to exclude a question on citizenship in the U.S. Census. But today, the Trump administration is being assailed from the Left for its efforts to include the question. The Left has responded typically, with accusations of racism. The question of nationality, they claim, is a danger to immigrants. There has also been no shortage of confusion as to whether President Donald Trump would go forward with its addition. Trump’s statements appear to contradict news reports that his administration dropped its plan to ask the question after a Supreme Court ruling. The planned citizenship question asks: “Is this person a citizen of the United States?” The political left’s dominant view is that the question could serve to marginalize immigrants or non-white Americans. NPR, quoting the Urban Institute, says the census threatens to put “more than 4 million people at risk of being undocumented.” The headline warns the addition of the question could lead to “worst under count of black, Latinx people in 30 years.” But the framing implies Trump is the first U.S. President to include a question on citizenship, when in fact Trump is simply following the established and understandable tradition of asking those who fill out the form if they’re actually Americans. The charge against Trump is one that demands reframing – scumbag/liar-nObama was the first to not include a question on citizenship, naturalization, or nativity in almost 200 years. The Trump administration is simply undoing scumbag/liar-nObama’s 8-year effort to distort the status quo....
Roberts Thwarted Trump, but the
Census Ruling Has a Second Purpose
by John Yoo and James Phillips
{ .theatlantic.com } ~ When the Supreme Court blocked the Trump administration from adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census, almost everyone focused on the political consequences... If the question led to an undercount of minorities and immigrants, it could affect the decennial allotment of congressional seats and electoral votes. Yet the long-term significance of the case, Department of Commerce v. New York, lies elsewhere, in what it portends across the expanse of the federal government. Like surface tremors that hint at deeper movements farther below, the census case—especially when viewed alongside lower-profile cases that the high court decided this term—signals the beginnings of a long-term shift in the tectonic plates of our constitutional system that will challenge government by administrative agency, rather than by our elected representatives. The census issue remains in litigation, even as the administration struggles to designate which lawyers will represent it. But sometimes losing a political battle can result in winning a constitutional war. President Donald Trump might not get his census question, but conservatives who have long campaigned against the American administrative and regulatory state may receive a far greater consolation prize: The court has fired the first serious shots in decades against an administrative state run amok. The counterrevolution is on. In the census case, Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion blocked the Trump administration from asking respondents in next year’s census about their citizenship. However great its impact, the case itself turned on a technical point of administrative law. But in Supreme Court jurisprudence, even technicalities cast long shadows. The court found that the Department of Commerce had manufactured a pretext in court for including the citizenship question. Commerce’s real reason could have been to benefit Republican states in the 2020 census by undercounting immigrants, who group more highly in blue states such as New York and California—and in the parts of red states that send Democrats to Congress. Chief Justice Roberts, joined by the four liberal justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor, declared that “the evidence tells a story that does not match the explanation the Secretary gave for his decision.” The “sole stated reason” for adding the citizenship question to the census, he observed, “seems to have been contrived.” Federal agencies must “offer genuine justifications for important decisions, reasons that can be scrutinized by courts and the interested public.” Otherwise, judicial review becomes “an empty ritual.”....
A Victory for State Education
By Anne Christine Hoff
{ americanthinker.com } ~ An existing struggle over the nature of culture and politics has been reenergized in recent years, in part due to the election of Donald Trump. At least if recent curricular changes for Texas K-12 social studies programs are any indication... that shift has also come to the rarefied world of state education politics. For the 2019-2020 academic year, Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) officials voted in favor of a curriculum that gave pride of place to traditional Texan notions, including describing defenders of the Alamo as “heroes” and highlighting America’s “Judeo-Christian” background such as by voting to include the biblical Moses as a prominent lawgiver who influenced America’s legal tradition. These efforts were opposed vigorously by Texas chapters of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), whose personnel attended the November amendments session. CAIR Austin’s executive director Maria Sheikh, together with the progressive Texas Coalition for Human Rights, also sent out an action alert a few weeks before the session to make activists aware of the open session when proposed revisions to the social studies curriculum in the 2019-2020 academic year would be reviewed. CAIR describes itself as a Muslim civil rights organization, but its critics have long accused it of promoting Islamist ideology, and U.S. federal prosecutors have shown the group’s close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, a designated terrorist organization. CAIR itself has been designated as a terror group by the United Arab Emirates. In particular, CAIR strenuously objected to changes in Texas social studies curriculum which described the Israel-Palestine conflict as being at least partially caused by “the rejection of the existence of the state of Israel by the Arab league and a majority of Arab nations” and another change which asked students to “summarize the developments and impact of radical Islamic fundamentalism on events in the last half of the twentieth century, including terrorism and the growth of terrorist groups.”....
commie-Ocasio-Cortez’s Chief Of Staff Admits
What The Green New Deal Is Really About —
And It’s Not The Climate
by PETER HASSON
{ dailycaller.com } ~ Democratic New York Rep. commie-Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal” is more about drastically overhauling the American economy... than it is about combatting climate change, her top aide admitted. commie-Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, made the revealing admission in a meeting with Democratic Washington Gov. Jay Inslee’s climate director in May. A Washington Post reporter accompanied Chakrabarti to the meeting for a magazine profile published Wednesday. “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal, is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” Chakrabarti said to Inslee’s climate director, Sam Ricketts. “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing,” Chakrabarti added. commie-Ocasio-Cortez’s press office didn’t immediately return an inquiry regarding whether Chakrabarti’s admission would undermine the congresswoman’s Green New Deal advocacy. The Green New Deal calls for a number of hard left proposals, including getting the U.S. entirely off of fossil fuels within 10 years, providing universal health care, basic income programs and job guarantees....
Carbon-Free Power: Solar versus Nuclear
By Wallace Manheimer
{ americanthinker.com } ~ There are two possible sources of carbon-free power available today: solar power and nuclear power... Solar power includes solar photovoltaic converting sunlight directly into electrical power and solar thermal heating a fluid with sunlight and converting the heat to electricity. Solar power has received hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies and research grants in the United States alone, and perhaps as much as a trillion worldwide over the past 30 years. For that investment, solar contributes roughly 1% of the world's total power. So which is better, solar or nuclear? While it is impossible to provide a definitive answer now, there is a gigantic laboratory in Europe that gives a strong indication. That laboratory is France and Germany. For years, France has embraced nuclear power, and currently, it gets about 75–80% of its electric power from its 58 nuclear reactors. Germany has embraced an "energiewende," or energy transformation. It intends to get as much power as possible from solar, while disassembling its nuclear infrastructure. Currently, it is getting 25–30% from solar. Let's compare France and Germany on price for electricity and emission of CO2 into the atmosphere. Despite massive German subsidies, the price for power in Germany is rising fast, and it is approaching about 40 cents per kilowatt-hour. In France, the price is less than half of this in the United States, less than a third. Yet this is for solar producing less than a third of German electric power, whereas nuclear produces nearly all of the electric power in France. Regarding per capita CO2 injection into the atmosphere, the French inject about half of what the Germans do. Both countries have cars and trucks that use gasoline; however, in the electrical generating sector, the French emit little CO2, while Germany emits a great deal. It still must generate around two thirds of its power in the conventional way and must keep conventional thermal generators going for when the sun does not shine or the wind does not blow. At this point, at least, honors in the competition go to France and nuclear power. To see the dilemma facing solar power, it is necessary to go through some numbers; these bore people, but they are important. A typical coal, gas, or nuclear power plant generates about a billion Watts, or 1 gigawatt (1 GW), and occupies about one quarter of a square kilometer....
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Another Judicial Roadblock to Census Citizenship Question
Nate Jackson: The legal wrangling over the citizenship question on the 2020 census took another bizarre turn Tuesday, when U.S. District Judge Jesse M. Furman ruled that the Justice Department cannot replace nine lawyers working on implementing the question so late in the game without sufficient explanation. With just three days remaining in the appeal process, Furman wrote, “Defendants provide no reasons, let alone ‘satisfactory reasons,’ for the substitution of counsel.” Furman is the same judge who initially blocked the question itself in January, so this is no surprise.
A brief refresher is in order. President Donald Trump called for a question asking about citizenship to be placed on the 2020 census. Given the constitutional mandate for a census in the first place, and the history of such questions having appeared, it seemed reasonable. Yet, the Associated Press reports, “Opponents of the question say it will depress participation by immigrants, lowering the population count in states that tend to vote Democratic and decreasing government funds to those areas because funding levels are based on population counts.”
This is not an inaccurate criticism but it is an illegitimate one. By that we mean, yes, a citizenship question could result in less representation for Democrats. But they don’t want foreign interference in elections, right? So why do they want our very system of representation skewed by noncitizens? The question is rhetorical, of course — they want to rig elections to guarantee leftist rule.
In any event, the charge of “racism” evidently held enough sway to persuade Chief Justice John Roberts to conclude that the process and motivation behind the question was wrong, even if the actual legality of the question itself was perfectly fine.
After the Supreme Court loss, the Trump administration eventually dropped the question only for Trump to reverse that decision. The constantly changing rationale from Trump and other members of the administration seems to be par for the course on this entire effort. “Nobody has any f—king idea” what Trump wants, one official told The Wall Street Journal. The lawyer change is likely an attempt to put other people in charge of arguing the case so as to negate the questions about motivation. But Furman isn’t going to allow it.
The bottom line is that the question is not only entirely legitimate but it should be asked. Unfortunately, the Trump administration seems to have handled the process so poorly that critics were able to persuade judges to block the whole thing.
Footnote: The Washington Times reports, “Two-thirds of voters approve of a citizenship question on the 2020 census, and that includes [55%] of Hispanic voters.” ~The Patriot Post
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