here is the thing, time is running out. the 2020 census forms have to be printed in just a few weeks. let s bring in nbc s pete williams outside the supreme court. he has been covering the supreme court for nbc news. are you ready for it? for 26 years. that means but who is counting. he knows what he s talking about. also joining us maya wiley senior vice president for social justice at the new school. pete, bra he can this down for us. the court s decision, it s not that you can t ask the question, it s the way the administration handled it? reporter: precisely. the court said, for example, that it would not violate the constitution s command that you have to enumerate the population if you added this question. that was one of the arguments that the challengers made, that this would so skew the process that you would never get an accurate count. the supreme court rejected that argument. so i think you all have framed it precisely. what happens now is the supreme court said the
efforts to do it and the court and the legality. i think there are a lot of people in america and in some hours i think of myself as one of them, who are not sure what the implication is of this. maya, ucla survey found if you added a citizenship question to the census up to 10% of the population would likely not respond. i think we can t ask enough why does this matter and what are the implications? don t you think the average person might be like, yeah, sure, why wouldn t you? right. i think this is exactly the problem. we are in a context in which folks even if they are in the country legally have felt har s harassed by immigration services. we have a child who was literally crossing the border from mexico into the united states and had a passport who was detained for hours and the threats of raids. remember that the enumeration isn t about citizenship, the enumeration is about how many people are here and under what conditions. and so if we create an
boundaries, is a quintessential political partisan political act and we don t know what the standard is. it s in the for us as judges to answer that question. so that would seem to shut the door. you know, this is, i think, the third or fourth time somebody has tried to get one of these partisan gerrymandering cases, the closest they came was a case from pennsylvania about i think ten years ago in which anthony kennedy said, do you know what, i think maybe there is something to this idea, i just don t know what the test is, and other cases have come along trying to lay down such a test, but today the supreme court said forget it. we just can t decide this fundamentally partisan question, political question, and this one was a 5-4 vote along the traditional ideological lines. the census decision was not, it was the chief justice plus the four liberals. pete, i can t believe stephanie said, yeah, just explain the whole thing to us and you did. pete williams and maya wiley, thank you
environment in which people feel like they can t safely answer the question, meaning it might be used against them in some way, whether legally legitimate or not and results in them not answering it, the reality is we will see states losing potentially congressional seats because of an undercount of population. in fact, new york state, for example, lost two seats in the last round. traditionally low income people of color and rural communities are undercounted. that means both political voice but it also means dollars, things like how much money is allocated, for instance, for school lunch. that impacts everyone. so the most important issue here is not making people afraid, but enabling them to count. that s why the careerists in the census bureau did not want this question. pete, i want to go back to this case because you and i and maya and stephanie and i had
in the back. police were in the area responding to a report of vandalism. in baton rouge, louisiana, police just released body footage showing officer blane salamoni threatening to kill alton sterling before fatally shooting him in 2016. the state announced it will not press charges against the officers involved in the shooting. joining me from john j. college, maya wiley senior vice president for social justice. jamil smith of rolling stone and eugene scott of the washington post. thank you all for being here. phillip, we re going to start with alton sterling because you have new information you just gleaned this morning. why don t you share that with us? that s right, joy. i was able to speak with two individuals associated with the baton rouge police department. this is in the broader context. whenever there s the investigation, we get the outcome, but wep often don t get transparency into the facts of