A|encies to send Commerce Data
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump walked into the Rose Garden on Thursday evening and asked what he considered a simple question, “Are you a citizen of the United States of America?”
Flanked at the podium by Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Trump declared that others are trying to erase the concept of citizenship, but “we are not backing down on our effort to determine the citizenship status of the United States population.”
It was a face-saving way to retreat in his quest to include a citizenship question in the 2020 census, before an audience of conservative social media activists and supporters of border security seated before him. While
Trump had announced the session on Twitter as a “news conference” at daybreak, he did not take reporters’ questions after igniting media interest.
Rather than insisting that the Census Bureau include a citizenship question in the census, Trump said he would sign an executive order to put a new plan into effect immediately.
He ordered “every department and agency in the federal government to provide the Department of Commerce” with data that could serve as a proxy to a census question. The new system, Trump offered, could be more accurate than the question alone.
Trump’s resolve unraveled after last month’s Supreme Court ruling that blocked inclusion of the citizenship question. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’ rationale for including the query “seems to have been contrived.”
Logistical, not legal, problem
Barr declared his belief that a new question would pass muster in the Supreme Court, despite the June ruling that blocked the question in the 2020 census, but said there was not enough time to navigate the legal obstacle course that surely would delay the process.
“As the Supreme Court recognized, it would be perfectly lawful for the federal government to ask on the census whether individuals are citizens of the United States,” Barr asserted.
“The impediment was a logistical impediment, not legal,” Barr later added.
That claim did not prevent Dale
Ho, director of the ACLU’S Voting Rights Project, from declaring victory: “Trump’s attempt to weaponize the census ends not with a bang but a whimper.”
“He lost in the Supreme Court, which saw through his lie about needing the question for the Voting Rights Act,” Ho said of the 5-4 ruling, in which Roberts took issue with
Ross’ claim that he included the citizenship question solely to help the Department of Justice enforce the Voting Rights Act. “It is clear he simply wanted to sow fear in immigrant communities and turbocharge Republican gerrymandering efforts by diluting the political influence of Latino communities.”
The event put an end to a detour that Trump engineered after Ross issued a statement on July 2 that, in light of the ruling, the Census Bureau would not include the question in the forms it was printing. Trump declared stories that reported Ross’ statement as “FAKE!” and maintained that the federal government would indeed include the question.
Democrats claim victory
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s office released a statement on “Trump’s census defeat.”
“President Trump is so intent on intimidating communities of color that even when the courts and rule of law thwart him, he still tries to persist in his ham-handed ways. The president’s retreat on adding the misguided citizen question to the census was long overdue and is a significant