Here’s the Government’s brief in the SCOTUS case over the inclusion of a citizenship question in the decennial enumeration.

I expected the arguments about speculative standing, about the deferential APA review, and about the degree of discretion ostensibly committed to the Secretary of Commerce.

But the substantive argument (p. 32-34) encapsulated by the following (p.14) is willfully obtuse:

The [district] court’s “most significant” reason for overruling the Secretary’s policy choice was its [illogical] conclusion that citizenship data in federal administrative records is somehow more complete and accurate than that same data plus data from the census.

It’s only illogical to conclude that A is more than A+B if you ignore the evidence that B is a net negative, undermining the value of A as well — like everything the career folks at the Census Bureau had been saying for years. It’s not crazy to think that you’d make a house more sturdy by reinforcing the walls than by reinforcing the walls and tunnelling under the ground floor.