The decision as it stands is a victory in this fight against the administration’s glaring sabotaging of the census, which has gone as far as throwing its own officials under the bus in order to rush the count. “The plaintiffs sought to stop the Trump administration’s plan to force the Census Bureau to shorten the 2020 count against the judgment of the bureau’s own expert staff,” Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law continued, “and in the middle of a pandemic.”
Just this month, U.S. Census Bureau documents made public by a whistleblower warned the rush would “reduce accuracy,” as well as create “risk for serious errors not being discovered in the data,” Talking Points Memo reported at the time.
“Bureau officials requested an extension of census data collection, processing, and reporting deadlines to accommodate a Covid-19 plan that President Trump publicly supported, and spent multiple months acting on that plan,” Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law said. “But on Aug. 3, Commerce Secretary Wilbur L. Ross and Census Bureau Director Steven Dillingham abruptly announced that the data-collection would stop on Sept. 30, a full month short of the time census officials had previously said was necessary to complete the count.”
Additionally blocked by the court for now is the administration’s attempt to send completed population data to the White House by December 31. Citing pandemic concerns, the administration itself had asked for an April 2021 deadline, which the Democratic House approved. But, the New York Times reports, ”the Republican-controlled Senate has not acted on the request, leaving the administration leeway to order the shorter count.” Which then falls back onto this administration, and not a potential Biden administration. How convenient.
This is the second census-related loss the administration has seen in recent days. Earlier this month, a three-judge panel in New York, including two judges appointed by Republican presidents, blocked Trump’s unconstitutional and discriminatory order seeking to erase undocumented immigrants from the 2020 census, calling the demand “an unlawful exercise of the authority granted to the President.”
Combined with the impeached president’s attacks on mail voting, “these two moves represent a twin attack on American democracy by making it perilous for voters to vote safely from home this fall, and by undermining the foundations of political representation through a whitewashed redistricting and reapportionment process,” Daily Kos’ Stephen Wolf wrote in July. The administration is likely to appeal this latest court ruling, the NYT noted. I don’t know what’ll happen next as litigation continues to play out, but I can ask you to take the census right now if you haven’t done so already.
The federal judge’s ruling this week “is a significant victory in the ongoing fight to save the 2020 Census from a critical undercount of our country’s communities of color,” said Thomas Wolf, Senior Counsel and Spitzer Fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. “The census must count everyone, regardless of their race, ethnicity, or citizenship status. To do that in the face of Covid-19, hurricanes, and wildfires, the Census Bureau needs all the time it asked and planned for in the spring. The court’s order will give that time back to the Bureau by blocking the Trump administration’s illegal decision to shut down the census early.”
Source: http://feeds.dailykosmedia.com/~r/dailykosofficial/~3/IHuJjLdCsE8/-Trump-admin-again-loses-on-census-ordered-by-court-to-continue-count-through-end-of-October