Encore of Revival: America, July 15, 2019

Justice Roberts doesn’t believe that the citizenship question in the upcoming census is about voting rights. He’s right, it probably isn’t. A more believable reason might have been to confirm the accuracy of immigrant statistics from other Federal reports. A better census question would have been multiple choice: citizen, green card, other visa, and entry not requiring visa—nothing incriminating about that. Putting the question on a separate form from the rest of the census form would skew the data to protect privacy. But, SCOTUS wouldn’t allow the question as presented for the reason as defended.

We have two big issues with this ruling. First, if census questions are too invasive, people won’t answer them, then the data is less accurate. Second, remember: The Supreme Court always votes in favor of the Court, more than Right or Left politics, more than constitutionalism or idealism. And, as we should expect from hard-working law school grads, supreme justices love to penalize sloppy homework.

If we wanted to know Roberts’s politics, the defense should have provided a better defense. Trump shouldn’t have let his lawyers give lame reasons for relevant questions because the true reasons are good enough: The government wants to know the accuracy of other reports. Now, those other reports will be collected, collaborated, and cross-referenced instead, which might have been a better rout in the first place.

The Democrats enjoyed the younger generation of voters accusing anything and everything of being about racism, even when it wasn’t. It came in handy as a wild carded, one-shot-for-all silver bullet for rebutting opposition to Obama. It helped them get elected under the auspices of fighting a never-ending battle that had to continue. But, when one such young person got elected, it messed with the non-democratic rank-and-file culture of the so-called Democratic party. Now, Pelosi and AOC are in a cat fight. The problem is that people care. It’s not news, it’s just politics as usual. Maybe it’s a nice wake-up call to what is usual in Washington.

Just as usual is the scandalous underbelly of Washington, including Epstein. When he was caught up in scandals with Democrats, he didn’t matter. Now that they can’t keep their underage pimp afloat, the salvage operation in the Washington spin-control department wants to tie Epstein to Trump to at least get some return for their great loss. They’ll have to find someone to replace him now. And, they’d at least like to say the same for Trump, but they can’t.

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