So depressing.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court’s conservative majority seemed ready on Tuesday to allow the Trump administration to add a question on citizenship to the 2020 census, which critics say would undermine its accuracy by discouraging both legal and unauthorized immigrants from filling out the forms.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that adding the question would do damage to the fundamental purpose of the census, which is to count everyone in the nation.
“There is no doubt that people will respond less,” she said. “That has been proven in study after study.”
By one government estimate, about 6.5 million people might not be counted.
Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco, representing the Trump administration, acknowledged that the question could depress participation. But he said the information it would yield was valuable.
“You’re always trading off information and accuracy,” he said.
Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh noted that questions about citizenship had been asked on many census forms over the years and were commonplace around the world.
But by the end of the arguments, which lasted 80 minutes instead of the usual hour, the justices seemed divided along the usual lines, suggesting that the conservative majority would allow the question.
Much of the argument concerned statistical modeling. “This gets really, really technical,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said.
The federal government has long gathered information about citizenship. But since 1950, it has not included a question about it in the census forms sent once a decade to each household. Adding it could reduce Democratic representation when congressional districts are allocated in 2021 and affect how hundreds of billions of dollars in federal spending are distributed.
Courts have found that Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Texas could risk losing seats in the House, and that several states could lose federal money.