Tag: 2020 census

Trump administration drops citizenship question from 2020 census

The Hill logoThe Trump administration said Tuesday it was dropping a citizenship question from the 2020 census, days after the Supreme Court ruled against the question’s inclusion.

President Trump had initially said that he wanted to delay the decennial census as his administration continued to push for the question to be included in the 2020 survey.

But that effort appears to be over, after a Justice Department lawyer said the decision was made to start printing census materials without the question included.

View the complete July 2 article by Jacqueline Thomsen on The Hill website here.

House Democrats to continue census probe

Panel will resume query into why a citizenship query was added to next year’s census.

The House Oversight and Reform Committee will continue to investigate the addition of a citizenship query to next year’s census, Chairman Elijah E. Cummings said Thursday in the wake of the Supreme Court decision to block the question.

The investigation has been a hotspot of conflict between the House and the administration. The committee voted to hold Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt over document subpoenas earlier this month. Cummings, D-Md., called on the pair to comply with the subpoenas.

“[I]t is now even more clear that our Committee’s investigation must get to the truth of why the Trump Administration was pushing the citizenship question and why it is engaging in this coverup,” Cummings said in a statement.

View the complete June 28 article by Michael Macagnone on The Roll Call website here.

It was a terrible day for democracy in the Supreme Court

Don’t let the census case fool you.

The Supreme Court handed down two opinions on Thursday which could shape American democracy for decades.

The first, Rucho v. Common Cause, held that suits challenging partisan gerrymanders are entirely beyond the power of the federal courts to adjudicate. Henceforth, state lawmakers may draw the most aggressively partisan gerrymanders they (and their computers) can come up with. They may draw, as Wisconsin did, a gerrymander so impervious to democracythat Republicans win nearly two-thirds of the state assembly seats even in an election where they won 54% of the popular vote.

And the entire federal bench must sit on its hands and allow this to happen.

View the complete June 27 article by Ian Millhiser on the ThinkProgress website here.

Trump asks lawyers if they can delay 2020 Census in response to SCOTUS ruling

Axios logoPresident Trump tweeted on Thursday that he has asked lawyers to delay the 2020 Census in response to a Supreme Court decision that will temporarily block the administration from adding a citizenship question.

Seems totally ridiculous that our government, and indeed Country, cannot ask a basic question of Citizenship in a very expensive, detailed and important Census, in this case for 2020. I have asked the lawyers if they can delay the Census, no matter how long, until the United States Supreme Court is given additional information from which it can make a final and decisive decision on this very critical matter. Can anyone really believe that as a great Country, we are not able the ask whether or not someone is a Citizen. Only in America!

Why it matters: It’s unclear what power Trump has to delay the Census, but it’s significant that the White House is considering additional legal action in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling. Per the Constitution, the Census is required to occur every 10 years.

View the complete Jun 27 article on the Axios website here.

House Oversight recommends contempt charge against Barr and Ross over citizenship question on census

AlterNet logoIn a morning press release, Democratic Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform Elijah Cummings announced that the committee has filed a bipartisan report recommending that both Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross be held in contempt of Congress. The contempt recommendation comes after both Barr and Ross refused to speak to Congress about the reason that a question on citizenship was added to the 2020 census form, and after other witnesses were blocked from discussing the issue.

Included with the recommendation is a transcript of the committee’s interview with former Ross adviser James Uthmeier. The transcript shows that officials at the Department of Commerce blocked Uthmeier from replying almost one hundred times. He didn’t answer questions about the advice he gave on the citizenship question. He wouldn’t answer when asked whom he had spoken to about the idea. He wouldn’t talk about a secret memo he wrote on the topic and hand-delivered to the Justice Department.

Even so, Cummings says it wasn’t completely useless to have the former adviser testify. “Despite these restrictions, Mr. Uthmeier provided the Committee with some new information,” wrote the committee chair. “He disclosed that he sought advice on adding the citizenship question from John Baker, an outspoken advocate who has argued that ‘the citizenship question is necessary to collect the data for a redistricting of House seats that excludes aliens from the calculation.’  Mr. Baker’s views on the citizenship question have nothing to do with enforcing the Voting Rights Act, but instead are focused on redistricting.”

View the complete Jun 25 article by Mark Sumner from Daily Kos not he AlterNet website here.

As Supreme Court decision nears, lower court orders new look at census citizenship question

Washington Post logoA federal appeals court said Tuesday that a Maryland judge should examine new allegations that the Trump administration had a discriminatory intent in adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, on the eve of a possible Supreme Court decision on the matter.

The order was part of last-minute wrangling in the lower courts, in the Supreme Court and on Capitol Hill as the justices are set to vote on the issue before the end of their term, presumably this week.

The Supreme Court is considering lower-court decisions that said Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross violated administrative law and the enumeration clause of the Constitution by proposing to ask the citizenship question of each household. Critics, even in the Census Bureau, say the question could cause an undercount of millions of people who would be afraid to return the form.

View the complete June 25 article by Robert Barnes, Felicia Sonmez and Tara Bahrampour on The Washington Post website here.

Commerce Dept. ordered ex-official not to answer House panel questions

A former senior Commerce Department official refused to answer more than 100 questions during an interview with the House Oversight and Reform Committee that centered on the Trump administration’s controversial decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, according to atranscript released Tuesday.

Commerce Department lawyers instructed James Uthmeier, who served as senior adviser and counsel to Secretary Wilbur Ross, not to answer the committee’s questions about his contacts with the White House and his conversations with Ross.

Uthmeier was also directed not to discuss the contents of a memo he wrote to a senior Justice Department official, John Gore, that purportedly outlines legal arguments surrounding the addition of a citizenship question to the census. On several occasions, Uthmeier was also blocked from disclosing details about his own conversations with Gore.

View the complete June 25 article by Andrew Desiderio on the Politico website here.

Trump asserts executive privilege over subpoenaed census docs

President Trump has asserted executive privilege over congressionally subpoenaed documents on the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census, the Department of Justice announced Wednesday.

The announcement comes as the House Oversight and Reform Committee is set to vote on whether to hold Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt for failing to comply with congressional subpoenas for the documents.

“By proceeding with today’s vote, you have abandoned the accommodation process with respect to your requests and subpoenas for documents concerning the secretary’s decision to include a citizenship question on the 2020 census,” Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd wrote in a letter to House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings(D-Md.).

View the complete June 12 article by Jacqueline Thomsen on The Hill website here.

A dead man just revealed the Trump administration’s plans to rig elections for white Republicans

They don’t believe in democracy.

A longtime Republican operative urged Trump administration officials to add a question to the 2020 census form that hasn’t been asked since the Jim Crow era, knowing full well that including this question “would clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats” and “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites,” according to a document filed in federal court on Thursday.

The Trump administration did add the question, which asks whether census respondents are U.S. citizens, at the urging of Dr. Thomas Hofeller, a Republican master in the dark arts of political mapmaking who passed away last summer. It also produced documents which falsely claimed that the question would “ensure that the Latino community achieves full representation in redistricting.”

Last January, a federal court ordered the citizenship question removed from the census form, citing numerous violations of laws laying out the process the government must use if it wishes to change that form. Notably, Judge Jesse Furman wrote in his opinion striking down the citizenship question, the administration’s stated reason for adding the question “was pretextual” — that is, the administration said that it added the question to help protect voting rights, when it was really up to something else altogether.

View the complete May 30 article by Ian Millhiser on the ThinkProgress website here.

How the Supreme Court’s Decision on the Census Could Alter American Politics

HOUSTON — Studded with taquerias and Catholic churches on street after street, the 29th Congressional District of Texas has among the highest proportions of Hispanics in the country.

But the fact that the district — which traces a jagged semicircle around Houston’s east side — is three-quarters Hispanic may not be its most defining statistic. These days, the most important number may be the estimated share of its residents who are not American citizens: one in four.

A battle is brewing over the way the nation tallies its population, especially in immigrant-dense places like Texas’s 29th District, that could permanently alter the American political landscape. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority appeared ready to allow the next census in 2020 to ask respondents if they are American citizens — a question that has never been asked of all the nation’s residents in the census’s

View the complete April 23 article by Michael Wines on The New York Times website here.