...The plaintiffs argued that one motive for the question was to allow for redistricting on the basis of the citizen voting-age population. The president’s solicitor general explicitly denied that, calling it a “conspiracy theory … nonsensical even on its own terms.” Now Trump is baldly saying it was true.
Trump’s accidental moment of honesty is bad news for Wilbur Ross, whom Trump is effectively hanging out to dry as a perjurer. It’s bad news for the solicitor general and the Justice Department lawyers, who have to go before federal judges and admit that their prior claims were nonsense. It would be bad news for the credibility of the Trump administration, were there still any objective debate about its credibility, which there is not, or if the president cared about being shown as a liar, which he does not.
In today’s filing, the Justice Department cites the litigation over the president’s travel ban, in which the Supreme Court ultimately decided to consider only the final legal version of the ban and ignore Trump’s previous statements. Everyone living in the real world knew it was intended to fulfill the president’s campaign-trail promise to implement a Muslim ban, but the Supreme Court effectively said that as long as the government constructed a separate rationale that could pass legal muster, it was acceptable. Now, in the census case, the government wants the courts to once again ignore all of its previous statements and consider only some as-yet-unspecified rationale. In other words, the administration would like to be rewarded for lying....
theatlantic.com |
