"It’s Not Going to Get Any Easier for Democrats After Trump."

That's a NYT headline for a column by Thomas Edsall. 

Key sentence: "The precariousness of the Democrats’ position in the coming decade hit home for me after reading 'The 2026 Midterms Are Critical. But 2032 Could Be Existential,' a March 24 essay that Steve Schale, a Democratic strategist based in Florida posted on The Bulwark."

I have no gift links left to give on this, the last day of the month, but even if I did, I wouldn't use one for this. Just go read Schale's piece at The Bulwark. It's not paywalled. Or don't even do that. The big point is just that the 2030 census is going to be very tough on the Democrats.

"President Trump said on Thursday that he had ordered the Commerce Department to begin work on a new census that excludes undocumented immigrants."

"A new census would be a significant departure for a process stipulated by the Constitution to occur every 10 years. Historically, the census has counted all U.S. residents regardless of their immigration status, a process that helps determine both the allotment of congressional seats and billions of dollars in federal money sent to states. 'People who are in our Country illegally WILL NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS,' Mr. Trump wrote in a post on social media.... Mr. Trump tried a similar move in 2020 to keep undocumented immigrants out of the census, but a federal court rejected that attempt, and the Supreme Court declined to intervene...."

The NYT reports.

"For a long time, the dominant thinking about Latinos was that they complicated the Black-white binary that has defined race in the United States."

"Recently, though, some Afro-Latinos have argued that Latinos have reinforced it. There are Black Latinos and white Latinos, who each experience the world differently. [Nancy López, an Afro-Dominican sociologist at the University of New Mexico] has argued that Latinos’ different experiences stem from their 'street race,' meaning how they are perceived when they walk down the street.... 'Now we’re just gonna mix race, ethnicity, and origin, everything,' she told me. 'It’s all the same. We’re all the same color. No, that’s not the reality. And to say otherwise is to eradicate our ability to document inequities based on what you look like.'... [I]t is hard to imagine what the shared racial characteristics of Latinos are. Proponents of the combined question say that the experience of anti-Latino discrimination defines Latinos as a race. This seems to grant too much power to non-Latinos to define who Latinos are, and doesn’t acknowledge how Latinos, even if they are racialized, are racialized differently depending on factors such as skin color and class background...."

From "Should Latinos Be Considered a Race? A proposed change to the census faces opposition from Afro-Latino groups, and exposes conflicts among Latino communities" (The New Yorker).

"President Trump on Thursday abandoned his battle to place a question about citizenship on the 2020 census..."

".... and instructed the government to compile citizenship data from existing federal records, a significant retreat in the president’s wider crackdown on undocumented immigration.... The new approach, which appears to have been available to the Trump administration all along, could provide a clearer picture of how many people living in the United States are citizens without distorting census participation. But some Democrats complained on Thursday that the public debate itself might have sown fear among immigrants in the country and could taint their view of the census, even if it does not include the question about citizenship."

The NYT reports.

"President Trump on Friday said he is 'thinking of' issuing an executive order to allow for a citizenship question on the 2020 census..."

"... as his administration faced a midafternoon court deadline to say how it planned to move forward.... Mr. Trump said he was considering four or five options about how to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census after the Supreme Court ruled that the administration’s rationale for creating such a question was 'contrived.' ... 'We’ll see what happens,' Mr. Trump said on Friday. 'We could also add an addition on. So we could start the printing now and maybe do an addendum after we get a positive decision. So we’re working on a lot of things including an executive order.... I have a lot of respect for Justice Roberts, but he didn’t like it... But he did say come back — essentially he said come back.'"

The NYT reports.

"A day after pledging that the 2020 census would not ask respondents about their citizenship, the Justice Department reversed course on Wednesday..."

"... and said it was hunting for a way to restore the question on orders from President Trump. Officials told a federal judge in Maryland that they thought there would be a way to still add the question, despite printing deadlines, and that they would ask the Supreme Court to send the case to district court with instructions to remedy the situation. President Trump had been frustrated with Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross for mishandling the White House’s effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, according to an administration official, and [tweeted] on Wednesday... 'The News Reports about the Department of Commerce dropping its quest to put the Citizenship Question on the Census is incorrect or, to state it differently, FAKE!... We are absolutely moving forward, as we must, because of the importance of the answer to this question.'"

The NYT reports.

"The Trump administration said Tuesday that it had ordered the Census Bureau to start printing forms for the 2020 census without a question asking about citizenship..."

"... abandoning its quest to add the query after being blocked last week by the Supreme Court... It was also a remarkable retreat for an administration that typically digs into such fights.... It was unclear what prompted the administration to walk away from its effort. Word of the action came in a one-sentence email from the Justice Department to lawyers for plaintiffs in a New York lawsuit that sought to block the question’s inclusion in the head count. The email offered no explanation...."

The NYT reports.

It's not that hard to figure out. It wasn't worth the political ugliness, and they could easily have lost the second-time around through the courts.

"ROBERTS, C. J., delivered the opinion for a unanimous Court with respect to Parts I and II, and the opinion of the Court with respect to Parts III, IV–B, and IV–C..."

"... in which THOMAS, ALITO, GORSUCH, and KAVANAUGH, JJ., joined; with respect to Part IV–A, in which THOMAS, GINSBURG, BREYER, SOTOMAYOR, KAGAN, and KAVANAUGH, JJ., joined; and with respect to Part V, in which GINSBURG, BREYER, SOTOMAYOR, and KAGAN, JJ., joined. THOMAS, J., filed an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part, in which GORSUCH and KAVANAUGH, JJ., joined. BREYER, J., filed an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part, in which GINSBURG, SOTOMAYOR, and KAGAN, JJ., joined. ALITO, J., filed an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part."

That's the line-up on Department of Commerce v. New York, a case that promises to be difficult to read. But the easy take away is that the Court was unanimous. Unlike the non-unanimous case I just spent an hour and a half writing about, it doesn't do something big, clear, and final. It's all fractured. And I need a break.

So let me just dish up Amy Howe's "Opinion analysis: Court orders do-over on citizenship question in census case." Excerpt:

Linda Greenhouse has noticed "a meme in conservative media" that liberals are using the idea of the Supreme Court's "legitimacy" to flip John Roberts to the liberal side.

She says, in "Who Cares About the Supreme Court’s ‘Legitimacy’?" (NYT).

“There’s a wooing going on,” David French warned in National Review in March under the headline “The Temptation of John Roberts.” His focus was not the census case but abortion and the Mueller report. “According to this construct,” Mr. French wrote, “it’s Roberts the ideologue who would vote to restrict abortion rights. It’s Roberts the conservative who would back the Trump administration. But a chief justice who cared about the institution of the Supreme Court? Well, he guards Roe. He checks Trump.”

In The Wall Street Journal last month, under the headline “John Roberts’s ‘Illegitimate’ Court,” the newspaper’s editorial columnist, William McGurn, wrote: “For those not fluent in modern Beltway, let us translate: It’s a threat, aimed at John Roberts. If the chief justice does not produce the desired progressive outcome, the Roberts court will find itself attacked as institutionally illegitimate.” This week, The Journal’s editorial board took aim at the new development in the census case under the headline “Census Target: John Roberts.” “Whenever you read ‘legitimacy’ in a sentence about the court, you know it’s a political missile aimed directly at Chief Justice John Roberts.”...

[T]he steady flow of right-wing commentary mocking concerns about the Supreme Court’s legitimacy (and I readily admit to having added my voice to those concerns) leaves me with this thought: What about the other justices? Why is it assumed on the right that Chief Justice Roberts is the only conservative on the court who has its welfare in view and who worries about the loss of public confidence if the justices come to be seen as mere politicians in robes?

Maybe the question answers itself....

No, the question shouts out, I'm not the question!

And the "right-wing commentary" is not "mocking concerns about the Supreme Court’s legitimacy." Everyone on the Court is concerned about its "legitimacy," a concept that includes, among other things, a lot of fretting about whether the Court will be perceived as deserving the power it wields, which is, ironically, a very political concern.

"Legitimacy" is a category of rhetoric, and everyone uses it. The most frustrating thing for liberals is that non-lawyer people tend to think that the conservative approach to constitutional interpretation is the right way to do it and that the liberals seem to want to use the courts as an alternative to the legislative process.

The wooing of Chief Justice Roberts that Greenhouse quotes is an effort to get the legitimacy talk working in the liberal direction. It's not a new subject. It's a big, long, old conversation.

"Suppose the Secretary puts in a question about sexual orientation. Suppose he puts a question in about arrest record. Suppose he says, I'm going to have the whole survey in French..."

"We have no role to play no matter how extreme?" Justice Breyer questioned the Solicitor General, who was defending the decision to put a question about citizenship on the 2020 census. (Here's the pdf of the oral argument.)

I couldn't find a story about the argument on the front page of the nytimes.com. I had to do a search, and I came up with this snippet:

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority seems poised to allow the Trump administration to add a question on citizenship to the 2020 census. Adding the question, government experts said, could depress participation in the census (about 6.5 million people might not be counted) and affect how congressional seats are allocated. 

Ah, that links to the Adam Liptak report on the argument. Here. Excerpt:

The Supreme Court just granted cert. in the case about adding a question about citizenship to the 2020 census.

Robert Barnes reports at WaPo.

The census hasn’t asked the question of each household since 1950, and a federal judge last month stopped the Commerce Department from adding it to the upcoming count. He questioned the motives of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, and said the secretary broke a “veritable smorgasbord” of federal rules by overriding the advice of career officials.

Those opposed to the question argue the census response rate will likely fall if households are asked whether undocumented immigrants are present, and make less accurate the once-a-decade “actual Enumeration” of the population required by the Constitution....

The case is Department of Commerce v. New York. New York said in its brief:

The enumeration affects the apportionment of representatives to Congress among the states, the allocation of electors to the electoral college, the division of congressional districts within each state, the apportionment of state and local legislative seats, and the distribution of hundreds of billions of dollars of federal funding....

For at least the last forty years, the [Census] bureau has vigorously opposed adding any such question based on its concern that doing so ‘will inevitably jeopardize the overall accuracy of the population count’ by depressing response rates from certain populations, including noncitizens and immigrants....

"Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg returned to the Supreme Court Friday for the first time since she underwent surgery in December...."

"... a court spokeswoman said. Ginsburg, 85, participated in a private conference with her colleagues as they considered which cases to accept for review or reject, said court spokeswoman Kathleen Arberg. One item on the agenda was whether the court should skip its normal procedures and consider whether the Trump administration may add a question about citizenship to the 2020 Census form sent to every household in the country."

WaPo reports.

"Manning up and womaning down: How husbands and wives report their earnings when she earns more" — a study from the U.S. Census Bureau.

"Do gendered social norms influence survey reports of 'objective' economic outcomes? This paper compares the earnings reported for husbands and wives in the Current Population Survey with their 'true' earnings from administrative income-tax records. Estimates from OLS regressions show that survey respondents react to violations of the norm that husbands earn more than their wives by inflating their reports of husbands’ earnings and deflating their reports of wives’ earnings. On average, the gap between a husband’s survey and administrative earnings is 2.9 percentage points higher if his wife earns more than he does, and the gap between a wife’s survey and administrative earnings in 1.5 percentage points lower if she earns more than her husband does. These findings suggest that gendered social norms can influence survey reports of seemingly objective outcomes and that their impact may be heterogeneous not just between genders but also within gender."

By Marta Murray-Close and Misty Heggeness, "not necessarily represent[ing] the views of the U.S. Census Bureau." I don't like the government nosing into the psychology of marriages.

I'm seeing that because it's discussed in "When Wives Earn More Than Husbands, Neither Partner Likes to Admit It/Deceiving the census: New research suggests that social attitudes are lagging behind both workplace progress and how people actually live their lives" (NYT). From the Times article:

Marriage therapists say marriages can become shakier when women earn more than men if men feel insecure or women lose respect for them. Economists say it’s one reason the loss of working-class jobs for men has led to such discontent — and to fewer marriages.

“Blokes are threatened by wives who earn more, which surprises nobody but is interesting that you can actually find it in the data,” said Justin Wolfers, who studies the economics of the family at the University of Michigan....

Blokes....

“When the gender norm is violated, there is some compensating behavior to try to undo some of the utility loss experienced by the husband,” said Marianne Bertrand, an author of the study and an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

From the comments at the NYT, this is the second-highest rated:

This is the most important article in the newspaper today, not the clown's antics. The crisis in masculinity, the failure to acknowledge, understand, or find comfort in women entering the workforce since the 1970s, is what got the clown elected in the first place, and is what drives rightist politics. See Krugman today on the ideology of right-wing politicians despite what their constituents vote for or want. The desperation to recover masculinity in its older forms drove men and women of Germany to embrace someone who promised to lead them out of the humiliations of WWI. We face not a culture war as a distraction, but as the driving force. See Edsall on this topic in his recent post. See gun advertisements promising a purchase of manhood, as if the symbolism weren't enough.

"The 2020 census will ask respondents whether they are United States citizens, the Commerce Department announced Monday night..."

"... agreeing to a Trump administration request with highly charged political and social implications that many officials feared would result in a substantial undercount," says the NYT in "Despite Concerns, Census Will Ask Respondents if They Are U.S. Citizens."

Now, there might be a legal challenge to this, and certainly there's political opposition, but what will happen if what the NYT calls "concerns" are elucidated for the general public? Look out. It's a trap.

Critics of the change and experts in the Census Bureau itself have said that, amid a fiery immigration debate, the inclusion of a citizenship question could prompt immigrants who are in the country illegally not to respond. That would result in a severe undercount of the population — and, in turn, faulty data for government agencies and outside groups that rely on the census. The effects would also bleed into the redistricting of the House and state legislatures in the next decade.

Did you know that immigrants — including those here illegally — were included in the population count that determines the number of House districts and how many Electoral College votes a state gets? These individuals cannot vote, but — like children and felons deprived of the vote and all the people who could but don't vote — they enhance the power of the people who do vote. Is that right? The census undercount that we're invited to become concerned about is this inflation of the power of those who do vote, so that votes are not equally weighted.

It might be better to allow people to rest comfortably in the belief in the grand principle of one person/one vote.

"More white people died in the United States last year than were born..."

"... a surprising slump coming more than a decade before the Census Bureau says that the ranks of white Americans will likely drop with every passing year."

"Slump" — used there by The Washington Post — sounds kind of mean. The first definition in the (unlinkable) OED is: "To fall or sink in or into a bog, swamp, muddy place, etc.; to fall in water with a dull splashing sound."

NPR's embarrassing headline: "In Voting Rights Arguments, Chief Justice Misconstrued Census Data."

The article is by Nina Totenberg, who presumably didn't write the headline, and it makes a somewhat abstruse point about the basis for a set of questions that the Chief Justice asked at oral argument.

Roberts' questions and conclusion appear to be taken from a census survey cited in a lower court dissent. 

"A lower court dissent" is a funny way to refer to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals case that is under review! Roberts pulled something out of the case that the Court is working on. Under the circumstances, it would be bizarre if the Solicitor General didn't get the reference. (Check the transcript PDF at page 32.) Tapping material in the lower court's opinion is predictable and perfectly mundane. Totenberg glosses over that to stress the data underlying the Court of Appeals judge's opinion, which, she tells us, comes from Census Bureau data that have such a wide margin of error that it doesn't really mean much. Well, if that's such an important point, why didn't the Solicitor General say that in the oral argument?! Here's what we got instead:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: [D]o you know which State has the worst ratio of white voter turnout to African American voter turnout? 

GENERAL VERRILLI: I do not.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Massachusetts. Do you know what has the best, where African American turnout actually exceeds white turnout? Mississippi. 

GENERAL VERRILLI: Yes, Mr. Chief Justice. But Congress recognized that expressly in the findings when it reauthorized the act in 2006. It said that the first generation problems had been largely dealt with, but there persisted significant -­ 

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Which State has the greatest disparity in registration between white and African American? 

GENERAL VERRILLI: I do not know that. 

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Massachusetts. Third is Mississippi, where again the African American registration rate is higher than the white registration rate. 

Maybe saying "I do not know," Verrilli secretly meant that the Census data was so rough that no one could really "know" such facts, but the transcript shows a blank statement of lack of knowledge and an effort to shift away to the subject of what findings Congress relied on. If the statement in the dissenting opinion (written by Stephen F. Williams) was so unreliable, Verrilli should have shot it down neatly and quickly. 

He didn't. Totenberg is doing cleanup work. She went out and talked to "Census officials" who told her that "these numbers are simply not reliable for state-by-state comparisons because of the high margins of error in some states." That's useful to know, as the issue in the case has to do with how closely the Voting Right Act tracks the actual problem of voting rights violations in the states.

But "Chief Justice Misconstrued Census Data"?! Why doesn't NPR care about its reputation for journalism? What an embarrassing display of eagerness to discredit Roberts! Totenberg's article isn't about Roberts misconstruing anything. It's about the relatively low value of Census data that Judge Williams used in his dissenting opinion. If that material was so terrible, Verrilli fell short at oral argument.
 
ADDED: Pepperdine lawprof Derek T. Muller emails noting Totenberg's focus on 2010 census data, when the relevant data — in the Court of Appeals case and for the purposes of the 2006 reenactment — is the 2004 data:

Massachusetts SOS miffed that John Roberts said Massachusetts has "the worst ratio of white voter turnout to African-American voter turnout."

The Chief Justice was questioning  Solicitor General Donald Verrilli in the oral argument about the federal Voting Rights Act (which treats some states differently from others based on voting statistics from 1972). The Chief also pointed out that Mississippi has the "best" ratio.

Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin defends his state:

“It’s just disturbing that the chief justice of the United States would spew this kind of misinformation.... He’s wrong, and in fact what’s truly disturbing is not just the doctrinaire way he presented by the assertion, but when we went searching for an data that could substantiate what he was saying, the only thing we could find was a census survey pulled from 2010 … which speaks of noncitizen blacks...We have an immigrant population of black folks and many other folks. Mississippi has no noncitizen blacks, so to reach his conclusion, you have to rely on clearly flawed information.”

The 2010 tables show that Massachusetts does have a high discrepancy between turnout of white and black voters, but is in line with several other states, including Minnesota, Kansas and Washington, which actually has a wider ratio. The states are also similar on registration numbers. Additionally, the margin of error on each of these states’ data is over 10 percentage points, and many states on the list had populations of blacks so small, data wasn’t even available.

I'm sure the Chief was relying on something. Anyone know what it was? In any case, the basic point is intact: There's a disconnect between the problem the act seeks to rectify and the conditions among the states today. 

ADDED: Roberts was apparently referring to material in the dissenting opinion in the court below (the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals).  The underlying data is from the Census Bureau. Nina Totenberg having talked to "Census officials" who explain why their data is unreliable, writes an article that I critique here.

"Married couples have dropped below half of all American households for the first time..."

"... the Census Bureau says, a milestone in the evolution of the American family toward less traditional forms. Married couples represented just 48 percent of American households in 2010.... What is more, just a fifth of households were traditional families — married couples with children — down from about a quarter a decade ago, and from 43 percent in 1950, as the iconic image of the American family continues to break apart."

(NYT link.)

Ohio is losing 2 districts, including Kucinich's, and Kucinich might run for a seat in Washington state...

... which is picking up a district:

... Mr. Kucinich figures his aggressive brand of antiwar, pro-working class politics could sell well in a solidly blue state where he has ideological allies and was popular during his unsuccessful White House bids in 2004 and 2008. It is a somewhat novel idea that could be summed up as: Have seniority, will travel...
Mr. Kucinich’s attempt would certainly be unusual. In the early days of Congress, a few House members won election years apart in two different states. But Ed Foreman, now a motivational speaker, was the last to do so more than 40 years ago; elected as a Republican from Texas in 1962, he lost his re-election attempt in 1964, then won one term in New Mexico in 1968...

Should he decide to go ahead, Mr. Kucinich is certain to face charges of carpetbagging and confront questioners like a woman on Saturday who pressed him on whether political candidates should be homegrown or not. He had a ready answer.

“Where people live is always interesting,” Mr. Kucinich said. “Where they stand is quite instructive.”

Ha. Cool. Why not?! In case you're wondering about the Constitution, the relevant clause is Article  1, Section 2, Clause 2:

No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.

So all Kucinich needs to do is start inhabiting Washington by election day.

"We’re pivoting from a white-black-dominated American population to one that is multiracial and multicultural."

Looking at the 2000 census.