SUPREME COURT NOTEBOOK: Is Ginsburg using words carefully?

By MARK SHERMAN and JESSICA GRESKO 32 minutes ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — It’s been another taxing term for reporters who try to forecast the outcome of high-profile Supreme Court cases.

Many of us wrote that based on arguments in late April, the court’s five conservative justices would allow the Trump administration to go forward with a citizenship question on the 2020 census.

That turned out not to be true when Chief Justice John Roberts joined with the court’s four liberals, in a decision announced last week, to keep citizenship off the census questionnaire , at least for the time being. The administration said Tuesday it would drop its effort to put its question on the form.

But perhaps we did not focus enough on a hint dropped by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in early June. In a speech to lawyers and judges in New York, Ginsburg described those predicting the administration would win the case as “speculators.” The Merriam-Webster dictionary says a speculator may take something “to be true on the basis of insufficient evidence.”

https://apnews.com/0f8c7b636f2047fa9066a6b1fd8a0edd

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Send more women to Washington. That was what Ginsburg had to say Tuesday during an event at Georgetown law school in the nation’s capital, where she was asked about the number of women in politics. Yes, no woman has served as president, but voters sent a record number of women to Congress in the last election.

“Impressive numbers, but not enough. That’s right,” said Ginsburg, who co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union Women’s Rights Project before she was a justice.