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| Pearl White shooting an episode of "The Perils of Pauline", via Palisades Interstate Parks Commission. |
Really heartened to see the decision by Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose reversing the Commerce Department's crazy attempt to cut the 2020 census head-count off a month early. Not just because it means that in all likelihood we will get the most accurate count possible, but because it openly recognizes the bad faith and inadequate grounding of the original decision, clearly made under intense pressure from the politicals,
Justice Department attorneys have attempted to present speeding up the count as a way for the Census Bureau to meet the Dec. 31 legal deadline for reporting results in light of Congress not giving the bureau more time.
Koh noted, however, that explanation "runs counter to the facts."
"Those facts show not only that the Bureau could not meet the statutory deadline, but also that the Bureau had received pressure from the Commerce Department to cease seeking an extension of the deadline," the judge wrote in the order, which cites multiple internal emails and other documents the administration was required to release for the lawsuit. (NPR)
and characterizing it as "arbitrary and capricious".
In this it goes along with Chief Justice Roberts's decision on the DACA program, which made the same complaint about the Trump administration's attempt to curtail the program, upending hundreds of thousands of lives for no real reason, or rather no real reason the administration was able to express. This is an important point to remember: while we often think of tyranny in terms of cruelty, but the element of arbitrariness—the tyrant doesn't need to offer a reason for anything he does—is equally important and always has been to the discussion, arbitrariness as opposed to rule of law.
We can't expect Roberts to be concerned with cruelty, he's absolutely a Republican, but we can hope he will oppose arbitrariness, because it's bad for business. This is my take on Roberts, anyway, ever since his original 2012 decision on the Affordable Care Act, in which poor people in the states whose governments objected to expanding the Medicaid program were thrown under the bus but insurance companies and healthcare providers were preserved: he maintained the parts of the act that provided stability and profitability to the giants and their shareholders, as long as it didn't involve a lot of taxpayer dollars, though in a tricky way that would encourage Republicans to keep working on a "repeal and replace" project.
