President Trump gave up on a foundering effort to include the citizenship question on the 2020 census Thursday. With the deadline for printing census forms having passed by, the administration has decided to seek other ways of tracking the citizenship status of people living in the United States.
While Trump’s decision may disappoint supporters, the president said that he will issue an executive order to federal agencies to provide citizenship information to the Commerce Department. “Today, I am here to say we are not backing down on our effort to determine the citizenship status of the United States population,” Trump said in the Rose Garden.
Census fight
Joined by Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Trump promised the administration would leave “no stone unturned” and slammed Democrats for trying to “conceal the number of illegal aliens in our midst.” While promising a “far more accurate” count, Trump said that the administration would no longer pursue the question because it had become logistically unfeasible.
Trump’s reversal comes mere days after he told Justice Department lawyers to keep fighting for the question despite the Supreme Court’s vote against it last month. The Supreme Court rejected the White House’s argument as “contrived” in a 5-4 decision, with chief justice John Roberts siding with the liberals.
The Trump administration had argued that the citizenship question was necessary to enforce the Voting Rights Act, but Democrats claimed that the question was a political ploy to force an undercount in liberal, Democratic districts by scaring immigrants. The census is used for apportioning congressional districts, dividing out the number of electors in each state in the Electoral College, and allocating federal funding.
The Supreme Court said that the Trump administration could press the issue again with a different argument, and White House lawyers rushed to find other options. But Trump decided that litigating further, with the census forms already printing and legal challenges to the question still pending in lower courts, would make fighting a fruitless battle.
Barr, who agreed with Trump earlier this week that the Supreme Court’s decision was a “mistake,” blasted the media for misleading reports that Trump was planning to barrel through the Supreme Court’s objection with an executive order. “This has never been under consideration,” Barr said.
An “alternative path”
Trump’s reversal puts an end to a bitter fight with Democrats that went all the way up to the Supreme Court. Last week, Trump caught DOJ lawyers by surprise when he suddenly tweeted that he was not backing down, even after the Commerce Department said they would go forward with printing the census materials without the question. Trump’s reversal prompted a last-minute scramble at the White House to shore up legal arguments for the question that had fizzled out by Thursday.
Department of Justice spokesperson Kerri Kupac confirmed Thursday that White House will be taking an “alternative path” to the desired result of an accurate citizen count. “The Department of Justice disagrees with the Supreme Court’s decision. Today’s Executive Order represents an alternative path to collecting the best citizenship data now available, which is vital for informed policymaking and numerous other reasons. Accordingly, the Department will promptly inform the courts that the Government will not include a citizenship question on the 2020 decennial census.”
The census debate was about much more than the population count. By rejecting the question as illegitimate and racist, Democrats took another step towards obscuring any distinction between citizens and non-citizens — essentially declaring that American citizenship does not matter. By opposing the citizenship question, Democrats admitted that they see illegal immigrants as a source of political power. And with Democrats coming to embrace government-paid healthcare for illegal immigrants, the left’s effort to erase the significance of American citizenship could carry huge economic costs for the country going forward.
Victory for open borders, defeat for common sense
Trump spoke for many conservatives when he expressed frustration with the fact that the government was barred from asking such a rudimentary, important, and common sense question in the census.
“We spend $20 billion on a census,” Trump said at a White House social media summit Thursday. “They go through houses, they go up, they ring doorbells, they talk to people. How many toilets do they have? How many desks do they have? How many beds? What’s their roof made of? The only thing we can’t ask is, are you a citizen of the United States. Isn’t it the craziest thing?”
No comments: