By Michael Leppert
MichaelLeppert.com

Being “authentic” is the buzz these days. Spin has gotten so out of control in our politics that it now takes special training to just be real. “Fake news” and “fact checks” are also new staples used so often they are losing their sting. But when the leader of the Judicial branch of our government describes the reasoning of the Executive branch as “contrived,” that is important.

It’s a slightly more dignified way for the court to call the administration liars.

Yes, the U.S. Supreme Court stole the headlines on Thursday, as it often does on the last day of its term.

Two important 5-4 decisions were highlights primarily for their legal conclusions. But the decisions on gerrymandering and the census also established that Chief Justice John Roberts is clearly this court’s new “swing” vote. He voted with the conservatives in the gerrymandering case, stating that the federal courts were not the place to decide how congressional districts should be drawn. He then voted with the liberals on the question of whether the census can include a question about citizenship, authoring a particularly scathing opinion directed at the Trump administration.

Helpful hint: the government should not devise or invent its reasoning for important decisions while Chief Justice Roberts is in charge.

Secretary of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross had attempted to add a question about citizenship to the 2020 census. The results of the census are important for many reasons, specifically regarding federal government funding and representation in Congress by the states. The notion of adding the citizenship question was widely expected to drive down participation in the process, and therefore the total. So, 18 states sued to block the question from being added.

The constitution explicitly requires “an Enumeration” of “all persons,” including the “whole number of persons in each State.”

Other demographic data has been gathered through the censes over the decades, but the constitutional purpose of the exercise is “enumeration.” Anything that might adversely impact that purpose should be kept out of it. Census officials feel strongly about this.

The Trump administration’s purpose for asking people their citizenship status is designed to accomplish the opposite, to drive down the enumeration, particularly in states with large immigrant populations like California and New York. Their political reasoning is also clear: fewer people in those states means less representation for “blue” states.

There is significant history for a legitimate debate on asking this question when conducting the census. But in typical Trump fashion, instead of having the legitimate debate in hopes of prevailing on the facts, it constructed a nonsensical argument about how it needed citizenship information to protect voter rights. Huh? The GOP fighting for voting rights is suspicious in and of itself, even before the plaintiffs successfully proved that Secretary Ross had fabricated the entire endeavor.

Chief Justice Roberts wrote in the census case that agencies must offer “genuine justifications for important decisions, reasons that can be scrutinized by courts and the interested public…Accepting contrived reasons would defeat the purpose of the enterprise. If judicial review is to be more than an empty ritual, it must demand something better than the explanation offered for the action taken in this case.”

Wow.

Roberts has consistently displayed a tendency to preserve executive branch authority, but even he has his limits. Being lied to is apparently too much for him to tolerate.

Governing is often difficult. Counting used to be simple. I know plenty of people who find comfort in math by using reasoning like “numbers never lie.” Honestly, is there anything more predictably authentic than a number?

Joseph Stalin said “It’s not the people who vote that count. It’s the people who count the votes.” Pretty insightful from a brutal dictator who never faced a general election by those he ruled.

The census decision on Thursday, coupled with the gerrymandering case, is all about how we count and how counting can be manipulated by our governmental processes. The average American likely does not care much about these cases with the same enthusiasm as they would gun or abortion related rulings.

If they only knew how interconnected these things truly are with one another, maybe that would change.

This is Chief Justice Roberts’ court. It has been for some time, but now he is not just the chief, he’s the swing. On Thursday in these two cases, he went right once and left once. Many will see it more as going right and wrong.

Too many Americans don’t have any opinion at all, I mean, if we were counting them.

FOOTNOTE: Michael Leppert is a public and governmental affairs consultant in Indianapolis and writes his thoughts about politics, government and anything else that strikes him at MichaelLeppert.com.

TheStatehouseFile.com 

INDIANAPOLIS – A while back, I was hustling through a mall to get to a business lunch.

It was the holiday season. Kiosks dotted the concourse.

A young woman stepped out from one of them and thrust a tube of some sort of miracle cream at me.

Would I be interested in trying a sample, she wanted to know.

I smiled and told her I was in a hurry to get to a meeting.

Undeterred, she pressed on.

“Can I ask you a question?” she said. “How do you feel about all those lines on your face?”

I stopped, turned and gave her a much bigger smile.

“Like I earned every one of them,” I said and then headed off to my meeting.

I’m about to have a birthday.

Number 60.

When I mentioned that to a friend a few days ago, she responded with the cliché.

“Oh, you don’t look 60,” she said.

Well, yeah, I do. And that’s okay. As that great philosopher Popeye put it, I yam what I yam.

I’ve never understood our culture’s obsession with youth. The same goes for our seeming disdain for old age.

It’s not that I didn’t enjoy being young. I did. I had fun in my 20s and 30s. I learned the lessons I was supposed to from those years and passed many pleasant hours while I did so. They were good days.

But so were the days that followed. In most ways, they were better. I married. My wife and I had children. My work got richer, deeper and more rewarding in all ways.

Much of that happened because my life ripened. With time and experience, I became more assured and less insecure. I learned to savor the moments and the people I encountered better and more fully. I discovered the value of taking a deep breath, doing a five-count before responding and of trying to consider the situation from the other person’s perspective.

Each additional year reinforced the lesson about the importance of forgiving others and, just as often, myself. There are burdens we must carry in life, but there also are some we don’t have to bear. And shouldn’t bear. Resentment and regret can be among the heaviest. We should set them down whenever we can.

It’s easy to glorify the energy of youth, because it can be intoxicating. When I was a young man, I loved being able to run 10 miles as hard and fast as I could without having to worry about pulling anything or being sore the next day.

It’s true that my gait isn’t as fast as it once was. Age has made me a step or two slower in most things, including rushing to judgment. And that’s to the good.

We say that life is a journey, not a destination.

Too often, though, we act as though it was a journey that should be stopped – or paused – near the start. Our cultural preoccupation with staying eternally young means that we think of our lives too often as a series of losses – lost youth, lost vitality, lost chances – rather than a series of gains.

Gained experience.

Gained appreciation.

Gained wisdom.

Each is a gift that time alone can offer us. For that reason, a satisfying old age should be an aspiration, not an anticlimax.

What the young woman in the kiosk with the miracle cream was trying to sell me was the same notion that so much of our culture tries to push – that my life would be better, that I would be better, if I could pretend to roll back the clock and look younger once again. She, like so many other people, wanted me to feel bad that I’d grown older.

To many people, I suppose, my face might have looked better and more attractive when it was younger, unlined, smoother. But that fresh face was the one I was born with.

This is the face, through both good days and bad, through success and failure, through hard work and hard lessons, that I’ve earned with the life I’ve led.

Every line of it.

FOOTNOTE: John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.