Author Topic: Levitt on the collateral consequences of Department of Commerce v. New York (SCOTUS)  (Read 1432 times)

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Online Elderberry

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SCOTUSblog by Amanda Frost 4/19/2019

On its face, Department of Commerce v. New York asks whether the government may add a question about citizenship status to the 2020 decennial census.

But as Professor Justin Levitt explains in a forthcoming essay, if the government wins, the citizenship data could influence the allocation of representation in the state legislatures, raising a whole new set of constitutional questions left unresolved by the Supreme Court’s 2016 decision in <a href="https://casetext.com/case/evenwel-v-abbott-1 ">Evenwel v. Abbott[/url].

In 2018, the government announced that the 2020 census would include a question to determine the citizenship status of every person in the United States. A number of states, localities and civil rights groups challenged the addition of the citizenship question, arguing that the government’s reasons for including the question were unsound and were a pretext for discrimination, and that including the question would depress the response rate. The government responded by arguing that the challengers lacked standing, that the choice of census questions was unreviewable and that in any case the addition of the citizenship question was justified by the need to gather such data to enforce the Voting Rights Act.

More: https://www.scotusblog.com/2019/04/argument-previewjustices-will-review-challenge-to-census-citizenship-question/