Hi, I'm Armin Alme.

The U.S. Supreme Court is supposed to be beyond partisanship, but of course, some court rulings

have political impact for decades, and now we have two examples of how that happens. Two decisions

expected this month. There'll be a test of Chief Justice John Roberts.

He claims the court is impartial, but he's a Republican appointee with a very conservative background.

There is this tremendous opportunity to reshape the law in the direction that he would like.

And on the other hand, he knows that if things are done in that

direction, that the court is going to be seen as an even more of a political institution than it is

now. That's Rick Hassan. He's Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California

at Irvine. He's author of Plutocrats United, subtitled in part, the Supreme Court and the Distortion

of America's Elections. Thanks for joining us.

Great to be with you.

Let's start with the issue that involves the census, which is called the gold standard body

of statistics that make the country run. What does that mean? What is the census? Where does

it come from? Well, so the Constitution requires that all of the people of the United States are counted

every 10 years. And this is really the largest peacetime undertaking in the United States.

It's a massive operation to try to count everyone and collect some basic information about them.

And the two primary uses of the census is one to apportion the number of members of Congress

among the states, because that's basically done more or less on the basis of population,

with each state guaranteed at least one member of Congress, and then rest done by population and also to dole out money based upon population. So if a state is getting

federal assistance for something, how many people determines how much money they get. So it's very

important for the states, both politically and economically.

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