His own Supremes told him he couldn't.
Why it's up to them is anybody's guess, I suppose.
But he wants to do it anyway, it seems.
A different AG would have told him he can't, would have refused, or would have quit.
Not this AG.
The Supreme Court last week rejected the administration’s stated reason for adding the citizenship question as contrived. wan
But Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, left open the chance that the administration could offer an adequate rationale.
Faced with tight printing deadlines, administration officials said on Tuesday that it was time to abandon the effort and begin printing forms this week that do not contain the citizenship question.
Justice Department lawyers told United States District Judge George J. Hazel in a telephone conference that a decision to eliminate the question from census forms had been made “for once and for all.”
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, whose department oversees the Census Bureau, issued a separate statement accepting the outcome.
But a day later, an extraordinary scene played out on a conference phone call between Judge Hazel and Justice Department officials, who appeared to be blindsided by the president’s comments online.
[He tweeted:]
The News Reports about the Department of Commerce dropping its quest to put the Citizenship Question on the Census is incorrect or, to state it differently, FAKE! We are absolutely moving forward, as we must, because of the importance of the answer to this question.An army of critics, from cities and states to ethnic and civil-rights advocates, have argued that the question is an ill-disguised effort to skew the census’s results to the benefit of the Republican Party.
That was only reinforced by the disclosure last month of a 2015 study by a Republican strategist, Thomas B. Hofeller, that explained how data from a citizenship question could be used to exclude noncitizens from the population bases used in redistricting.
The newly drawn districts, he wrote, would tilt toward non-Hispanic whites and Republicans and hobble representation of Hispanics and Democrats.
Mr. Hofeller, who died last year, was the first person to urge Mr. Trump’s transition team in 2016 to add the question to the 2020 head count.
Three separate federal courts — in New York, Maryland and California — have ruled that the Commerce Department violated federal procedural law and the Constitution in tacking the question onto the census.
They called the department’s rationale — to improve enforcement of the Voting Rights Act — an obvious cover for some other motive.
On Wednesday, Judge Hazel ratcheted up the pressure on the administration to make up its mind, ordering the Trump administration either to confirm by Friday afternoon that it was not placing the citizenship question on the census questionnaire, or offer a schedule for continuing the Maryland lawsuit.
. . . .
The Justice Department ultimately acted under pressure from Mr. Trump, who had reacted angrily to the Supreme Court’s handling of the census case and insisted that his administration move forward despite the court’s ruling.
The Democrats are only seeing the short term partisan impact.
They are forgetting that the idea has already been floated that a proper interpretation of the constitution would see that representation, taxes, and federal money are all related to the citizen population, only, and not at all to the total number of persons.
As the constitution actually says outright.
It's all in the interpretation.
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