Tag: United States Department of Commerce

Lydia Ortiz WASHINGTON — For all his talk about judges not being political actors beholden to a president, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and his conservative colleagues on the Supreme Court may hand President Trump one of the biggest political victories of his administration: the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census. It also happens to be a coup with profound implications for American democracy. At issue in Department of Commerce v. New York, which the justices considered on Tuesday in an 80-minute hearing, is not the legality of inquiring on the census form about people’s citizenship status. As Justice Neil Gorsuch put it, “It’s not like anybody in the room is suggesting the question is improper to ask in some way, shape or form.” Instead, the case is about administrative process. But those skeptical conservative justices were nowhere to be found on Tuesday. An analysis by census officials found that nearly 6 percent of households with at least one noncitizen, or roughly 6.5 million people, would go uncounted with a citizenship question on the 2020 census. During Tuesday’s arguments, the conservative majority showed little interest in the fact that Mr. Ross ignored the expertise of the United States Census Bureau, which had warned that the citizenship question would lead to significant undercounts because immigrants may be wary of participating. The conservative justices also seemed unbothered that Mr. Ross lobbied hard to get other federal agencies to provide a pretext for his plans — an effort “to obtain cover for a decision” that was already made, as one federal judge phrased it. Or as Justice Elena Kagan said on Tuesday, Mr. Ross was “shopping for a need” for the citizenship data. Federal law, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “grants the president broad discretion to suspend the entry of aliens into the United States.” So it may come to pass that, no matter how ugly the underlying evidence or how antithetical this change is to an “actual enumeration” of everyone in the United States, the justices will once again let the administration have its way.

The NAACP announced Thursday it would sue the Commerce Department, claiming it is withholding records about its preparations for the 2020 Census. The organization says the Commerce Department failed to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request before the deadline and is suing for immediate access to records. The NAACP wants to know about the U.S. Census Bureau’s plans for the 2020 Census, including records on hiring practices, digitization and the bureau’s efforts to reach out to “hard-to-count” populations. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for Connecticut, alleges the Census faces “serious obstacles” heading into its 2020 population count. “These include hiring and personnel gaps, exacerbated by a federal hiring freeze imposed in January 2017; an unprecedented move to digitize the census, with unknown vulnerabilities to cyberattack and disparate impacts on communities with less access to broadband internet services; a lack of senior leadership; and budgetary shortfalls at a time when the Bureau’s funding should be substantially increasing,” the complaint reads. “The Census Bureau routinely undercounts communities of color, young children, home renters, low-income persons, and rural residents,” NAACP general counsel Bradford M. Berry said in a statement. Thompson had led the bureau since 2013.