Agency backtracks on citizenship question

WASHINGTON — In a course reversal, a Justice Department attorney on Wednesday said the government is looking for a way to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, one day after it said it would drop that effort and was printing the form without it.

The statement came during a phone call with a federal judge in Maryland who had ruled against including the question.

Joseph Hunt, assistant attorney general for the department’s civil division, said the administration was looking for a legal path forward after the Supreme Court last week froze the administration’s plan to include it on the survey sent to every U.S. household and said the administration needed to provide a better justification if it wants to add it.

Hunt told Judge George Hazel of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland that Justice Department lawyers had been “instructed to examine whether there is a path forward, consistent with the Supreme Court’s decision.” Hunt did not say who issued the instruction.

In a separate filing in federal court in New York that also is handling a case about the citizenship question, Hunt wrote that the DOJ and the Department of Commerce had been asked to “reevaluate all available options” and that the Commerce Department may adopt “a new rationale” for including the question.

The discussion came during a day of legal turmoil triggered by a Wednesday morning tweet from President Donald Trump saying his administration was “absolutely moving forward” with its plan.

Three separate federal courts — in Manhattan, Maryland and California — have ruled that the Commerce Department violated federal procedural law and the Constitution in hastily tacking the citizenship question onto the census last year. The Supreme Court upheld the Manhattan ruling last week.