AG Barr rules that Trump Regime can ignore Supreme Court rulings by executive fiat, add citizenship question to census.

[Broomstick]

Trump said that instead of putting the citizenship question on the Census he will ask all government agencies to send citizenship/alien information to the Commerce Department to compile the information. Which, as far as I can see, is actually a legally allowed action on Trump's part.

[The Romulan Republic]

Trump said that instead of putting the citizenship question on the Census he will ask all government agencies to send citizenship/alien information to the Commerce Department to compile the information. Which, as far as I can see, is actually a legally allowed action on Trump's part.

I'd love it if state governments just flat-out refused. Legal or not, I can't shake the feeling that this is ultimately about drawing up a list of people to round up for the camps.

[LadyTevar]

Something, or someone, got Trump to back down.

Trump Retreats on Citizenship Question

President Donald Trump will no longer pursue adding a question on citizenship to the 2020 US census questionnaire.

Instead, he said he had directed officials to obtain the information through an executive order for government agencies, as court challenges would have delayed a census.

"We will leave no stone unturned," Mr Trump said.

The retreat follows a long fight over the inclusion of the question, which the Supreme Court had blocked in June.

"We are not backing down on our effort to determine the citizenship status of the United States population," the US president said.

"As a result of today's executive order we will be able to ensure the 2020 census generates an accurate count of how many citizens, non-citizens and illegal aliens are in the United States of America," Mr Trump said at the White House.

What reason did the Trump administration give?
The decision to abandon the citizenship question was a "logistical impediment, not a legal one", said Attorney General William Barr, standing alongside President Trump.

He said there was "ample justification" for the administration to include the citizenship question.

But referring to court injunctions, he said there was no way to "implement any new decision without jeopardizing our ability to carry out the census".

Census questionnaires without the citizenship question are already being printed.

Mr Barr repeatedly congratulated Mr Trump on the executive order.

How did the battle unfold?
At the end of last month, the Supreme Court returned the case to the Census Bureau in a 5-4 ruling that noted the reason for including the question seemed "contrived".

Government lawyers indicated they had dropped the question and officials began printing the 2020 census without it.

But Mr Trump then announced that he might consider an executive order to include the question or find other ways to move forward.

Legal experts noted that an executive order could not override a Supreme Court ruling.

The citizenship question has not appeared on a US census for all Americans since 1950, though it has been put to some subsets of the population between 1970 and 2000.

Never one to admit defeat
By Peter Bowes, BBC North America correspondent

In election year, a question about citizenship on the 2020 census form would have been hugely polarising.

For Donald Trump, whose stance on illegal immigration has defined his presidency, it would have been a major success.

But it is not to be. The hurdles proved too cumbersome and the administration acknowledged that outstanding lawsuits could delay the completion of the census.

But never one to admit defeat, Mr Trump framed his plan B as a "far more accurate" way to count the non-citizen population. Officials, he said, would "leave no stone unturned", in their quest to dig out citizenship information from existing data held by government departments.

That could be seen as an implied threat, but it means the census is likely to result in a more accurate count, with those living in the US illegally less afraid to make their presence known.

Census counts are used to determine the allocation of seats in the House of Representatives and the distribution of billions of dollars of funds in federal spending.

There had been concern that impoverished areas would lose out if a significant number of residents chose not to complete the form.

[Broomstick]

Trump said that instead of putting the citizenship question on the Census he will ask all government agencies to send citizenship/alien information to the Commerce Department to compile the information. Which, as far as I can see, is actually a legally allowed action on Trump's part.

I'd love it if state governments just flat-out refused. Legal or not, I can't shake the feeling that this is ultimately about drawing up a list of people to round up for the camps.

The state governments would not be involved in this, just the Federal agencies.

And it's not related to list for camps so much as use in gerrymandering election districts to assure Republican domination of government forever.

[The Romulan Republic]

On a related topic, the House is holding a vote today on criminal contempt charges for secretaries Barr and Ross over their withholding information on the census from Congress.

[The Romulan Republic]

Also, a judge has ordered that no question on citizenship can be added to the 2020 census in any form:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/16/politics ... index.html

[bilateralrope]

The ACLU filed their motion for sanctions on over false testimony:

ACLU Will Pursue Sanctions Against Trump Administration In Census Case

By Tierney Sneed
July 16, 2019 5:30 pm

The ACLU has won its legal war with the Trump administration over a census citizenship question, but it’s not backing down from its demand that certain administration officials be sanctioned for allegedly false testimony in the case.

In a court filing Tuesday evening, the ACLU alleged that top Trump administration officials in the Justice Department and Commerce Department “engaged in litigation conduct that is nothing less than a fraud on the Court.”

“Through the use of false or misleading testimony, they obscured evidence suggesting that the true purpose of Secretary Ross’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census—suppressing the political power of minority immigrant communities,” the filing said.

The ACLU is requesting that the court order 60 days of discovery — or let the ACLU piggyback on the discovery that may move forward in a separate census case — “to determine the scope of potentially sanctionable conduct and the identities of the culpable parties.”

Among the officials the ACLU is accusing of “false and misleading testimony” is DOJ official John Gore, who led the Department’s civil rights division while the administration was considering adding the question and who penned the official justification — which the Supreme Court has ruled was pretextual — for why the question was needed.

Additionally, the challengers said that Mark Neuman, who served as an outside advisor for the Commerce Department on the issue, outright “lied” in his deposition for the case.

Both are accused of obscuring the role that the now-deceased GOP gerrymandering consultant Thomas Hofeller played in allegedly crafting the bogus rationale for the question.

However, the conduct raised in the filing goes beyond what was just revealed about Hofeller, whose private files made it to the challengers’ hands only in May.

The filing suggests that James Uthmeier, an attorney who worked for the Commerce Department during its census change efforts, may have misled the court about his contacts with the White House about the census citizenship question issue, which he admitted in an interview with Congress.

The ACLU also pointed to Uthmeier’s acknowledgement to Congress that he began working on getting a citizenship question added in around March and April of 2017. “The Administrative Record does not reflect Uthmeier working on the question before late June 2017,” the filing said.

The ACLU is also pointing to the absence in the administrative record of Uthmeier’s communications with a far right law professor, which he also admitted in congressional interview.

The filing also raised the possibility that other Commerce officials — including the Department’s General Counsel Peter Davidson and Earl Comstock, its policy director — failed to provide documents relevant to the case.

The ACLU is now seeking that the court order the government to turn over certain discovery withheld in the case. The group also wants to subpoena files from a computer of Hofeller’s now in the possession of his business partner.

The ACLU wants to depose Neuman, Gore, Uthmeier, and Davidson, as well as Christa Jones, a Census Bureau official who was in contact with Hofeller, including about the census citizenship question issue.

Those lawyers are probably regretting working for the Trump administration right now.

[The Romulan Republic]

Good. Its not enough to keep checking or partially checking the Trump Regime's fascism while they find another way to push it forward. We need to start taking the fight to them, and bringing the guilty parties to justice. A stay isn't enough. There should be prosecutions.