Trump 'Very Strongly' Considering Census Delay After Blow from Supreme Court
President Donald Trump said Monday he is thinking about delaying the 2020 Census in the aftermath of last week’s Supreme Court ruling that rejected his administration’s effort to add a citizenship question.
In a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court rejected the explanation used by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross for adding the question. The ruling did not, however, address the core issue of whether the question could be added, leaving open the possibility that the question could be added should the Trump administration provide an explanation that would pass the court’s muster.
During a question-and-answer session with the media Monday, Trump was asked if he would push back the start of the census so that he could make another attempt at getting the question added.
“Yeah, we’re looking at that. We think that a census — obviously, if you do all of this work and you’re talking about — nobody can believe this, but they spend billions of dollars on the census, and you’re not allowed to ask? You don’t knock on doors of houses, check houses?” he said.
“You go through all this detail and you’re not allowed to ask whether or not somebody is a citizen? So you can ask other things, but you can’t ask whether or not somebody is a citizen?” Trump said, according to a White House media pool report.
“So we are trying to do that. We’re looking at that very strongly,” he said.
Trump was then asked why the question was important.
“I think it’s very important — to find out if somebody is a citizen as opposed to an illegal. I think there’s a big difference, to me, between being a citizen of the United States and being an illegal. And, you know, the Democrats want to treat the illegals, with healthcare and with other things, better than they treat the citizens of our country,” he said.
Trump then contrasted how illegal immigrants are treated as opposed to working Americans.
“If you look at a coal miner that has black lung disease, you’re talking about people that get treated better than the coal miner. And these people got sick working for the United States. And we treated people that just walked in better,” he said.
“If you look at what they’re doing in California, how they’re treating people, they don’t treat their people as well as they treat illegal immigrants. So at what point does it stop? It’s crazy what they’re doing. It’s crazy. And it’s mean, and it’s very unfair to our citizens. And we’re going to stop it, but we may need an election to stop it, and we may need to get back the House,” Trump said.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote the majority opinion in the 5-4 decision. Justices Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito dissented. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer joined Roberts in opposing the question.
In his dissent, Thomas scoffed at the majority’s logic.
“For the first time ever, the court invalidates an agency action solely because it questions the sincerity of the agency’s otherwise adequate rationale,” he wrote in a partial dissent joined by Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.
“I do not deny that a judge predisposed to distrust the secretary or the administration could arrange those facts on a corkboard and — with a jar of pins and a spool of string — create an eye-catching conspiracy web,” Thomas wrote.
Thomas said the ruling sets a dangerous precedent.
“Now that the court has opened up this avenue of attack, opponents of executive actions have strong incentives to craft narratives that would derail them,” he wrote.
Alito, in his own dissent, said that as far as he was concerned, the only question was whether the Department of Commerce had the authority to change a question, which he believed it did.
Logistical as well as legal issues enter into the question of pushing back the census in order to continue the effort to add a citizenship question.
The Commerce Department has said it had a July 1 printing deadline for census forms, but that it might be able to push that back to the end of October, The Hill reported. That would give the government a short window before the required census start date of April 1, 2020.
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