Tag: Wilbur Ross

House will vote ‘soon’ to hold Barr, Ross in criminal contempt over citizenship question

Pelosi announces plans for full House vote in dear colleague letter, also outlining legislative steps to protect migrants

The House will “soon” vote to hold Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary William Ross in contempt of Congress for defying subpoenas for documents explaining the administration’s rationale for wanting to add a citizenship question to the census, Speaker Nancy Pelosi wrote in a “Dear Colleague” letter on Monday.

The Oversight and Reform Committee last month approved a contempt resolution against Barr and Ross that included language to refer the matter to the U.S. attorney in Washington for possible criminal charges, as well as authorize the pursuit of a lawsuit.

The Justice and Commerce departments have provided the Oversight Committee with some documents on the citizenship question while withholding others over claims of executive privilege.

View the complete July 8 article by Lindsey McPherson on The Roll Call website here.

‘This is bizarre’: Trump flagrantly contradicts his own administration on census forms

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump contradicted two of his cabinet agencies to deny “fake” reports that his administration had agreed to print census forms without a citizenship question.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last week that the Trump administration had not offered a compelling legal argument to include the question, and the president at first claimed the White House lawyer would seek to delay the census process.

But the Department of Justice and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said this week the administration would go ahead and print forms without the question to meet the constitutionally mandated deadline.

View the complete July 3 article by Travis Gettys from Raw Story on the AlterNet 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.

Trump rage-tweets an idea that would violate the Constitution in furious response to the Supreme Court

AlterNet logoIn a blow to the Trump administration’s plans, Chief Justice of the United State John Roberts issued an opinion Thursday ruling against the Commerce Department’s plan to include a citizenship question on the upcoming 2020 Census.

While the administration claimed that the question was designed to help the Justice Department enforce the Voting Rights Act, Roberts and a majority of the court found that this explanation was not supported by the evidence in the case, and the Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s decision to remand the decision back to the agency. Many observers argued this will likely prevent the department from adding the question to the Census in time for the upcoming Census (though there’s some debate about this), and President Donald Trump, in two rage-filled tweets sent from his Japan trip, said he wants to delay the process:

View the complete Jun 27 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet 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.

House Oversight votes to hold Barr, Ross in contempt

The House Oversight and Reform Committee voted largely along party lines on Wednesday to hold Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt for failing to comply with congressional subpoenas.

Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) broke with his party to vote with the panel’s Democrats.

The high-stakes vote took place just hours after the Justice and Commerce departments announced that President Trump had asserted executive privilege over the subpoenaed documents, which were tied to the Trump administration’s addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

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

House committee to vote on holding Barr and Ross in contempt for failing to provide documents related to 2020 Census citizenship question

The chairman of the House Oversight Committee said Monday that the panel would vote to hold Attorney General William P. Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt for failing to comply with a bipartisan subpoena for documents on a Trump administration plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

The panel’s chairman, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), announced the move in letters to Barr and Ross on Monday. He gave them until Thursday to comply and raised the possibility of delaying the vote if they cooperate.

“Unfortunately, your actions are part of a pattern,” Cummings wrote to Barr and Ross in the letters. “The Trump administration has been engaged in one of the most unprecedented coverups since Watergate, extending from the White House to multiple federal agencies and departments of the government and across numerous investigations.”

View the complete June 3 article by Felicia Sonmez Tara Bahrampour and Rachael Bade on The Washington Post website here.