Plans to depose Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross will remain on hold in the Census citizenship case, with the Supreme Court on Monday granting the Trump administration’s request to halt the deposition, which was ordered by a lower court.
The Supreme Court, however, will allow the deposition of a top Justice Department official to go forward, and will also permit additional discover in the case that was ordered by the lower court but that the Trump administration also sought to block.
An appeals court had upheld the lower court’s decision green-lighting a deposition of the two officials, prompting the Justice Department earlier this month to take the extraordinary step of asking the Supreme Court to intervene.
The order, a temporary stay pausing the lower court’s decision in favor of the deposition, set a deadline of next Monday for the Trump administration to ask that the court fully consider the move to depose Ross. If the Justice Department does not ask for that full review by the deadline, the Ross deposition will be allowed to go forward. Otherwise the hold remain in place while the Supreme Court considered that request.
It is also possible that the challengers in the case — a consolidation of lawsuits brought by the ACLU and multi-state coalition led by New York — could decide to withdraw their request to depose Ross, given that the trial is supposed to start in early November.
The challengers, in seeking to depose Ross, pointed to evidence that he had operated in “bad faith” in claiming that he was adding the question because the Justice Department requested it last December for Voting Rights Act enforcement, when in fact he had been seeking to include the question since the early days of the administration.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, said in a partial dissent from the order that he disagreed with the move to allow the deposition of the DOJ official, John Gore, and the additional discovery.
“[T]here’s nothing unusual about a new cabinet secretary coming to office inclined to favor a different policy direction, soliciting support from other agencies to bolster his views, disagreeing with staff, or cutting through red tape,” Gorsuch wrote.
It’s not clear from the order how other members of the court voted on the issue.
Read the order below:
the tl;dr which is all I have time to do: nobody needs to be getting their panties in a bunch about this order.
Except Gorsuch and Thomas’s shamelessly partisan “concurrence” basically saying “hey, we’ve pre-decided this case and think we ought to just shitcan the whole lawsuit!” That was improper and another blow to the Court’s rapidly draining credibility.
It’s the lying Neil, it’s the lying.
The only shocker there is that Alito didn’t also note he would have made the ruling worse
Yep, this is mostly a win…only the Ross deposition was delayed, and it will go forward if the Trump administration fumbles and doesn’t request a full hearing. Odds are the rest of the information will be just as damning in the trial, and they have Ross’ emails and statements about what he did/wanted to point at. It would be better if they allowed the deposition of course, but this almost seems amazing considering what the court is like at the moment…Roberts must have sided with letting all the rest go and trying to say that a Cabinet officer needs extra examination (which doesn’t have any precedence of course).
Almost every move by the SC from now until the conservative block is broken is going to look like this…right wing assholes making statements that are shameful, the left doing actual juris prudence, and Roberts floating in the middle deciding how much he values the institution of law in the US. We can only hope this is a short chapter in our history.
trump during the campaign…“I’ll hire the best people! I know people who are Soooo goood…”