court s role is to defend its foundation. nothing is more important than free and fair elections. we re still waits for the census decisions. two other cases to go. there s the case about indian tribes in oklahoma, and how much jurisdiction they have over the state s land. i don t know if the census case would be the last one, but i would gisz it would by. my understanding is inside the court chief justice roberts is still reading decisions from the bench. it s not clear if justice kagan will read their dissent. explain that. reporter: right now they don t read their dissents, they summarize them, and chief justice roberts is finished, and right now elena kagan is he summarizings her dissent. ben, you heard melissa and others bring up the concept of
different form, now the court has dealt a defeat to the trump administration. they will not be able to add this citizenship question on the census, which was important to the states for two reasons. number one, the census is an enumeration of everybody, not just citizens, total population. that data is used to decide how big congressional districts are how many congressional districts the states get, and secondly how much money they get from federal programs. so this is a big victory for those states, primarily democratic states led by new york, that challenged this government decision, and also immigrant rights groups this question will not be on the form. the government said if they didn t have a decision by june, they wouldn t be able to print the forms. now they have their decision. pete williams, i know you were working through the case literally live on television. i m going to let you to take a
so this is a i think if i had to predict, the citizenship question is not going to be on the census form. ben, john roberts role in the census case, a significant one as our guests and analysts have laid out so far? yeah. so last year in the travel ban case chief justice roberts wrote the opinion for the court deferring to a record establishing the basis for the travel ban that a lot of people thought was a pretext. and people asked the question, okay, if the president can lay out this record and act supposedly on the basis of this administrative record and you re going to ignore all his other comments, what would it take to convince you that something really was a pretextual justification for an administrative action? and today we see the answer to that in both reports caoberts
bill the legitimacy of the courts to have republican judges striking down gerrymanderers. justice kennedy never closed the door. for more than a decade, show me a standard, if you can present me with one, i ll accept it. in this case the first amendment was supposed to have a standard. there is no manage at standard. and justice kagan writes of all the times to abandon the court s duty to declare the law, this was not the wurch. she says part of the court s role to is defend its foundations. none is more important than free and fair elections, and with respect and deep sads in i dissent. an extraordinary dissent from her, a chris cal decision from the supreme court and another one we are waiting for any minute from the justices on the key questions of whether a
couple minutes to continue reading it and talk with our team. i want to bring in john thompson, director of the census bureau in the obama administration. early plomts your initial reaction to the reports we re hearing so far. my initial reaction is it s a really good day for he the census, if the question is apparently disallowed. that will help the census get a much better count. it also is a good day for national statistics, because the court has ruled that the secretary of commerce can be arbitrary and capricious. if they ruled otherwise, a secretary could do a lot of damage to national statistics. like you said, i m quite