After months of losses in the U.S. court systems regarding the outcome of the 2020 election, President Donald Trump finally scored a large legal victory on Friday in the Supreme Court.
The case won’t impact the results of the 2020 election — but it could help conservatives in every future election.
The Supreme Court ruled to protect Trump’s plan to exclude illegal immigrants from the population count used to allot state seats in the House of Representatives from a challenge it ruled was premature.
The court’s decision Friday, led by its conservative justices, is not the final ruling on the matter. While it allows Trump to pursue his plan, the Trump administration is fighting against the clock.
It’s not clear whether he will receive final numbers from the Census Bureau when he leaves office next month. If the president still has not received final census numbers by that time, Trump’s plan will be effectively dead because a Democratic president is unlikely to pursue it.
For now, though, the high court said it was premature to throw out Trump’s plan because it’s not yet clear how many people he would seek to exclude and whether the division of House seats would be affected.
The court said in an unsigned opinion that “we express no view on the merits of the constitutional and related statutory claims presented. We hold only that they are not suitable for adjudication at this time.”
At least five of the court’s six conservative justices had to join the opinion to make a majority on the nine-member court.
The three liberal justices dissented, saying the effort to exclude people in the country from the population for divvying up House seats is unlawful.
“I believe this Court should say so,” Justice Stephen Breyer wrote, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.
States with large populations of people who are in the country illegally, like California, could lose seats in the House under Trump’s plan, and the president signaled in his memo that punishing states that “encourage illegal aliens” is one reason he issued it.
By the administration’s estimate, California could lose two to three House seats if people living in the country illegally were excluded based on what the administration said are more than 2 million such California residents.
His administration has defended his authority to exclude at least some people living in the country illegally, including perhaps people who are in immigration detention or those who have been ordered to leave the country.
But during arguments last month, acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall, Trump’s top Supreme Court lawyer, would not rule out larger categories of illegal immigrants, including those who have protection from deportation under the DACA program.
The census case likely is the last of several major cases involving illegal immigrants during Trump’s presidency, which has been notable for its hard line on illegals.
The president has a mixed record at the high court on immigration. The justices upheld his ban on travel to the U.S. by residents of some largely Muslim countries. But the court shot down his bid to add back a citizenship question to the census.
The Associated Press contributed to article