Court upholds census deadline
In a loss for the Trump administration, a federal appeals court in California on Wednesday said the nationwide census count must continue through Oct. 31.
A three-judge panel from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to stay a lower court ruling regarding the October deadline. However, the court stayed a portion of the ruling related to officials trying to meet a second deadline on Dec. 31.
Trump administration officials Wednesday night asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene and shorten the time frame. They had sought to end the count on Sept. 30, and later declared Oct. 5 to be the last day for counting.
The court found the president and bureau officers failed to make a strong case for halting the count. At first they “strenuously maintained that the current statutory deadlines were impossible to meet after the delays and changes caused by the COVID-19 suspension” but later the census director switched gears, and said he did not support an extension, the court said in its 21-page ruling.
With the president’s approval, census officials announced in the early days of the pandemic that they were extending the deadline through October, but they later retracted the end date. Civil rights groups, local and tribal governments jointly sued saying the new cutoff during a pandemicwas “arbitrary and capricious” and would cause “irreparable harm” to the accuracy of the count, especially in vulnerable communities that tend to be undercounted.
The 9th Circuit panel rejected the government’s request to halt the September order by U.S. District Judge Lucy H. Koh mandating that the count continue through the end of October.
After Koh’s order, the San Jose federal judgewent on the record a second time admonishing top officials at the Census Bureau and Commerce Department for overriding her ruling.at an online hearing Monday, a lawyer for the government told the trio of 9th Circuit judges itwas unprecedented for courts to order officials to violate “a clear, unambiguous, lawful and binding statutory deadline.”
“It really shouldn’t be subject to judicial second guessing and micromanaging,” said Sopan Joshi, an appellate lawyer with the Solicitor General’s Office.
U.S. Judge Susan P. Graber said it made no sense for administration officials to adopt a COVID extension that extended months beyond the statutory deadline and then argue that extending that very deadline was a violation of the law.