Chief Justice Roberts called the rationale for the citizenship question (that it’s needed to enforce the Voting Rights Act) “contrived” and gave the administration a chance to come up with a new one. But since that’s the only one the administration has come up with, any other rationale, hitherto unmentioned, is post hoc and by definition contrived. In effect, the administration is trying to contrive an uncontrived rationale.
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It’s a remarkably workable way for the SC to give the tarbaby back to the Administration. In principle, the SC has to allow that the Administration might come up with an acceptable justification, and their decision has to allow it. In practice, it’s impossible for the Administration to present any rationale now that would not be assumed to be post-hoc and thus rejected. So a lot of the political heat lands on the Administration for being obviously incompetent, rather than the SC for forbidding what a large fraction of the voters wants.
But of course, this all has the whiff of Who are “the people” whom the government is to serve? A lot of people want that to be no more than the people who are already citizens. Conversely, there’s a progressive faction who thinks that is the whole world.