Wednesday, July 03, 2019

Administration stops fighting for citizenship question on 2020 census after adverse Supreme Court decision

The 2020 census won't include the controversial citizenship question. Last week the Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration's stated reason for including the question but left open the possibility that another reason might be offered and accepted. Tuesday, Trump administration officials threw in the towel, ordering the Census Bureau to start printing forms for next year without the question, Michael Wines reports for The New York Times.

UPDATE, 8 p.m. July 3: “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 Washington Post reports. 

A citizenship question would likely reduce responses among Latinx populations, which are prevalent in some agricultural areas, affecting many things, from political maps to federal funding.

The move to stop fighting for the question's inclusion is an abrupt about-face. "Just last week after the Supreme Court’s decision, President Trump said he was asking his lawyers to delay the census, 'no matter how long,' in order to fight for the question in court. He reiterated his unwillingness to give up in a Twitter message posted late Tuesday, saying he had asked administration officials 'to do whatever is necessary' to get a citizenship question on the census form," Wines reports. "Word of the administration’s decision to stop fighting came in a one-sentence email from the Justice Department to lawyers for plaintiffs in a New York lawsuit that sought to block the question’s inclusion."

The email didn't explain the decision, but the administration may have been concerned about getting the forms printed in time. The Census Bureau had said it needed to start printing questionnaires by July 1 to meet an April 2020 deadline for conducting the census, Wines reports.

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