President Trump is considering an executive order to get what he wants: the citizenship question on the 2020 census, Axios is reporting this morning.
Last month the Supreme Court blocked the president’s relentless effort to add such a question because his Administration made a poor legal argument.
He won’t let it go, however.
“Trump’s insistence on pushing ahead with the question, potentially without doing the legwork the Supreme Court called for, reflects his expansive view of executive power,” reported Axios.
The possible executive order reinforces the raw partisan subtext of the entire saga.
The ACLU and blue-chip firm Arnold & Porter came across documents written by a Republican strategist that proved a political motivation. Adding the citizenship question, Dr. Thomas Hofeller wrote, would be “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.”
Critics have long said the case is a political engineering job to give Democrats fewer seats in the House, redounding to the GOP’s benefit. Texas could get fewer congressional seats, potentially impacting Democratic gains in the state.
“The Trump administration is stopping at nothing to accomplish its goal of suppressing the count of Latinos demonstrates the racial intent,” Susan Hays, an Austin attorney who fought the citizenship question, told the Texas Signal. “If the courts were to allow use of an executive order to bypass their own ruling then they will have actively participated in the demise of our system of checks and balances on government power. The People deserve better.”
The Census is a constitutional mandate requiring a count of all people, not just citizens, in the U.S. to determine congressional representation and federal funding to care for entire communities still recovering from Hurricane Harvey.
