Surprising job growth makes Fed rate cut iffy
WASHINGTON — U.S. employers sharply increased their hiring in June, adding a robust 224,000 jobs, an indication of the economy’s durability after more than a decade of expansion.
Manufacturers, who are bearing the brunt of President Donald Trump’s trade war, added jobs at the fastest pace since January.
The strength of the jobs report the government issued Friday could complicate a decision for the Federal Reserve late this month on whether to cut interest rates to help support
adding the query in statements that added to a weeklong swirl of contradictions that could make the administration’s legal case even more difficult.
The government has begun the process of printing the census questionnaire without the citizenship question, and that process will continue, administration officials said.
Government attorneys said in a filing Friday that the Justice and Commerce departments had been “instructed to examine whether there is a path forward” for the question, and that, if one was found, they would file a motion in the Supreme Court to try to get the question on the survey, which is to be sent to every U.S. household.
Their filing came in a case before U.S. District Judge George Hazel in Maryland that poses the issue of whether the addition of the citizenship question would violate equal-protection guarantees and whether it is part of a conspiracy to drive down the count of minorities. Hazel scheduled information-gathering to begin immediately and to conclude by Aug. 19, with any witnesses to testify in early September.
Statements on Friday from Trump and his acting U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services director, Ken Cuccinelli, seemed to add confusion to why the government wants the addition.
The administration had said in legal battles that the question is needed to get a better sense of the voting population to help enforce the Voting Rights Act. Opponents countered that the question could result in a severe undercount of immigrant communities.
But speaking to reporters at the White House on Friday morning, Trump said the question was needed “for many reasons.”
“Number one, you need it for Congress — you need it for Congress for districting,” he said. “You need it for appropriations — where are the funds going? How many people are there? Are they citizens? Are they not citizens?”
Trump’s statement could give additional heft to evidence discovered in May suggesting that the administration worked with a Republican redistricting strategist who saw the question as a way to give Republicans and nonhispanic whites an electoral advantage. Government officials had previously denied that adding the question had anything to do with the strategist or his analysis.
Appearing on Fox Business Network on Friday, Cuccinelli listed other justifications for the question: “Frankly, as part of the ongoing debate over how we deal financially and legally with the burden of those who are not here legally. That is a relevant issue.”
Trump had raised the possibility that some kind of addendum could be printed separately after further litigation of the issue.
Whether an executive order or an addendum is feasible at this stage is not clear, and any shift almost certainly would carry extra costs.
Were Trump to issue an executive order, it is hard to predict what might happen: Much would depend on what it said, when it took effect and what the Justice Department did to request court permission to deviate from its current course.
But it is likely that those suing would return to the federal judges who have already blocked the citizenship question and either ask them to clarify that their injunctions apply to Trump’s new executive order, or ask for new injunctions to yield the same effect.
If judges agreed, the administration once again would be stymied and forced to take the battle to higher courts.
Thomas Wolf, counsel with the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, said there is “no path” forward for the government to add the question at this point.
“The court vacated the Voting Rights Act rationale as a contrived pretext,” he said. “What they’re trying to do now is the textbook definition of a pretext — telling the court, ‘We plan to do this, but we don’t know why yet.’ “
Tacking on the citizenship question through an addendum is also fraught with legal and practical risks.
Census experts say that, among other concerns, an addendum probably would violate the bureau’s strict rules on testing a question, which include considering how the placement of a question on the form affects respondents’ likelihood of filling it out.
Terri Ann Lowenthal, a former staff director of the House census oversight subcommittee, said such a proposal is “neither operationally feasible nor scientifically sound, and it could not, at any rate, be pulled off in time for the 2020 census. The complexity of a census is as fine-grained as the weight of the packet that is mailed to households and the automated readability of forms. And the instructions for the original form would need to be revised to reference an ‘extra’ question on a separate page. The idea is little more than fantasy in the context of the current census.”