In spite of Donald Trump, Democracy won one, a big one.

On July 12, 2019, Democracy as we know it got a boost.  The President of the United States, Donald Trump acknowledged the supremacy of the rule of law and a constitutional crisis was averted.  The Supreme Court had ruled that his administration's proposal of putting a citizenship question on the 2020 census was unconstitutional because the reasons for their actions presented by the administration were bogus and they sent the question back to the administration to come up with a better reason.  In a press conference, President Trump bowed to the Supreme Court ruling, announced the citizenship question would not be on the census form.  He had formerly declared he would put the citizenship question on the census form in defiance of the Supreme Court ruling.  The rule of law and the checks and balances of another branch of government prevailed.

The Administration had argued that the purpose of placing a citizenship question on the census form was for ensuring the integrity of the election process restricted to citizens only and they were responding to a question from one of their agencies. That argument did not fly.

To put their best foot forward, Trump and his Attorney General Bill Barr contended there was not enough time to deal with other challenges in lower courts and to get the census forms printed in time by June 30.  To appease the white nationalist part of the base, Barr and Trump tried to appear to be their radical, anti-minority old selves and said they could get the information from various government departments about the count of non-citizen inhabitants and make policy decisions based on those estimates.

Of course, the number of House representative districts per state would still be based on census data, not guestimates made by federal agencies. The argument made by opponents of the administration's actions presented evidence that the motivation for the question on the ballot had little to do with election integrity but had much to do about partisan politics. It would have decreased the count of both citizen and noncitizen minority inhabitants. Hispanics, in particular, feared they or non-citizen members of the family would be subject to deportation by the Trump's administration ambition to deport non-whites, especially Hispanics, who were not citizens,  and information collected by such a census would be used to hunt down, target,  and deport them. The Census bureau had estimated that the count of families with at least one undocumented member would be reduced by 8%.

The impact of an undercount of minorities had widespread implications on partisan politics, as well.   It would have changed the electoral college vote and representation in Congress in favor of GOP for at least ten years, until the next census. New evidence had come to light that disclosed the administration's political consultant had advised the administration to put the census question on the census form specifically to increase the GOP's political power and representation. 

It also would have changed the distribution of federal aid to disaster relief, and other federally funded services flowing to states used for all of their inhabitants regardless of their citizenship status.  Not so coincidentally the losers were mostly blue states, like Colorado, who has large Hispanic populations. It would have resulted in a flawed census as a significant undercount of the portion of residents of the US since citizens and non-citizens would fear to respond to the census takers. In addition, it would have added more election districts dominated by a single party due to gerrymandering based upon the warped findings tilted to whites.  There is still fear the issue will result in an undercount of Hispanics who still do not trust the census process and may not respond to mail in forms or answer a knock at their door.  The administration may have bowed to the rule of law, but still, they may have reduced the number of minorities willing to respond to census takers because of their distrust of the Trump regime.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-expected-end-fight-add-citizenship-question-census/story?id=64262805

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/07/11/trump-order-citizenship-question-census-despite-supreme-court/1701405001/

https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/19/politics/judge-citizenship-census-case-substantial-issue/index.html

https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/four-takeaways-supreme-courts-census-citizenship-question-ruling

https://www.factcheck.org/2019/07/citizenship-the-census-and-obama/