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Interesting grants of cert.
Discussion here. Four very interesting cases. And that doesn't count NYSRPA v. NY, or the census question case (and the Supremes just asked for briefing on a new aspect of that, whether adding the question on citizenship violates the enumeration clause of Article I, sec. 2, which underlies the census, and simply refers to taking an enumeration of the people for allocating House seats.
A guess as to why the Court wants that added -- what if some Justices are of the mind that a power to take an enumeration of the people does not include doing anything else? You can count heads, but not ask much else?
Another possibility, and I'm not familiar enough with the case to know this.... might it challenge not only asking the question, but whether non-citizens should be excluded from the count? If so, there might be an issue as to whether a population is enumerated when certain persons are not counted. But if that was an issue, I'd have expected plaintiffs to raise it as Argument I, and not wait for the Court to raise the idea.
In any event, most Terms have a small number of interesting cases and a lot of uninteresting ones. It doesn't sound like October Term 2019 is going to be like that.
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Pulled up 1930, 1880 then 1900 censuses. 1900 has 3 citizenship questions. Yr of immigration, number of years in US, Naturalized?
1910 - 2 questions
1920 - 3 questions
1870 - question concerning 21 and older and 21 and older who cannot vote because of uprising, etc.
It is not well known, but the Attorney General has the power to administratively implement the Alien Address Registration System, which was discontinued sometime during the 1980s, apparently because of cost reasons and disinterest in continuing it. The system requires aliens to register at their local Post Office annually. No legislation is required to do this; it is already on the books; and it would be a reasonable basis for use in estimating numbers of aliens resident in the United States.
Alien Address Registration would now be claimed to violate Fifth Amendment self incrimination, for illegals.
That would of course be the claim, but it wouldn't necessarily hold water. The IRS already requires reporting of income from illegal sources. The escape from the "self-incrimination" argument is that the information reported cannot be used for law-enforcement purposes.
Just for clarity, those of us who track genealogy already know that questions concerning whether one is naturalized or an alien have appeared on censuses in the past.
I for one believe enumeration is merely a count but the feds have used the counts for much more. One aspect was to determine the number of eligible males for militia.
Until 1850, only the name of the head of household was listed, with the rest showing age ranges. In 1850 all names were included as were additions concerning race, sex, property ownership, etc.