Back in July, Trump had the grand idea that the census which is used to determine congressional districts and such, should exclude illegal immigrants in their count used for this. Which seems pretty fair on the face of it, since illegal immigrants are criminals by definition, and not American by definition, thus shouldn’t be represented in Congress.

The census doesn’t even ask this fucking question though, but somehow he wanted them to take their full number of people, and figure out some way to get a tally of illegal immigrants, and remove those fuckers from that total. As usual, Trump is big on ideas, but short on ways to actually do it, and this is no different. So Trump just instructed the Secretary of Commerce to figure it out.

As you can imagine, a bunch of bleeding hearts who know that illegals tend to vote for them more, filed suit to block this order, saying it was unconstitutional, which is a colorful argument at best. Basically, they were saying that the Constitution defines how the census is used to determine the number of house reps, and trying to change that proportion based on a number coming from something other than the census, was contrary to the constitution’s scheme.

A federal district court agreed, so here we are at SCOTUS after Trump challenged it. So now SCOTUS is being asked to determine if the states can even challenge this, since it’s a federal rule. And if so, is Trump’s directive unconstitutional.

In a partisan split, SCOTUS sided with Trump, and essentially said that the lower courts no jurisdiction to give an opinion on this case, and that it was essentially too early for them to sue anyway, since a plan on how to do what Trump wanted to do, hadn’t even been finalized yet. They stated it was, “riddled with contingencies and speculation that impede judicial review.” Basically arguing, you can’t challenge it before he’s even decided how it would work. Besides, Trump’s directive to exclude illegal immigrants may require the use of estimates, which the Constitution doesn’t allow, meaning they could win on that, if Trump doesn’t figure out a plan for solid numbers.

Their ruling leaves an opening for it to be challenged later once Trump’s plan to do this is finalized, which of course is now likely moot since Trump’s dumb ass lost the election.

So while this seems like a win for Trump, it effectively changes very little, and it’s clear that Trump, had he won, could still ultimately lose the ability to do what he hoped to do.

The left-leaning justices dissented because they basically wanted to put an end to Trump’s agenda on this before he went any further.