(The Blaze)
According to CNN, Chief Justice John Roberts changed his mind during deliberations before voting against the Trump administration and effectively killing plans for a citizenship question on the 2020 Census.
What happened with the citizenship question?
In March 2018, the U.S. Census Bureau announced that it planned to add a question to the 2020 Census that would ask respondents for their citizenship status. Supporters of the move argued that the inclusion of this statistic would prevent some states from artificially inflating the extent of their population (which determines how many members of Congress and electoral votes a state gets), while opponents said that it would prevent both noncitizen and citizen immigrants, particularly Hispanics, from responding at all out of fear.
The last time that a U.S. Census included a citizenship question was 1950.
On June 27, the Supreme Court effectively blocked this question from being added to the 2020 Census by sending it back to the lower courts, which did not leave enough time for it to be enacted in time to go to the printers. Roberts joined the four liberal justices (Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor) in arguing that while the inclusion of such a question was legal, the Trump administration needed to do a better job justifying adding it to the census. Read more