The Justice Department issued a statement Tuesday that said it was “disappointed” with a federal judge’s decision to block the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census.
“Our government is legally entitled to include a citizenship question on the census and people in the United States have a legal obligation to answer,” DOJ spokeswoman Kelly Laco said in the statement.
The Census Bureau moved to add the question in 2018 at Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s direction, and the Department of Justice defended the administration in the case U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman decided Monday, which was a consolidation of lawsuits brought by advocacy groups and a multistate coalition.
Here is the full DOJ statement:
“We are disappointed and are still reviewing the ruling. Secretary Ross, the only person with legal authority over the census, reasonably decided to reinstate a citizenship question on the 2020 census in response to the Department of Justice’s request for better citizenship data, to protect voters against racial discrimination. Not only has the government asked a citizenship question in the census for most of the last 200 years, 41 million households have already answered it on the American Community Survey since 2005. Our government is legally entitled to include a citizenship question on the census and people in the United States have a legal obligation to answer. Reinstating the citizenship question ultimately protects the right to vote and helps ensure free and fair elections for all Americans.”
You know it is time for a housecleaning when different agencies are competing to show how compromised they are by rushing to criticize a court decision that calls out the politicization of the census.
Kelly Laco, interesting carrier path.
Communications intern for RNC, then intern for some member of parliament in the UK, then intern for BP lubricants, then at AEI, then at the US House of Rep, then has been very quickly being moved up at DOJ in the past under 2 years.
Guess it pays to be willing to be a hack.
As the judge said, this is a pretext. The citizenship question has nothing to do with voting rights. It’s about trying to reduce the population of states with large numbers of non-citizen immigrants (like California) for purposes of representation in Congress.
There is a legal process to adding a question to the Census, doing it responsibly to make sure it doesn’t impact the questionnaire or response rate. And then there is shoving a question onto the Census in the hope that it lowers the count in areas that won’t vote for your party, which is illegal. At least so far…we’ll see if the SC overturns it, but to do that they will have to ignore precedent and an airtight decision based very firmly in the law that points out it was blatant cheating.
Lot of lies to unpack in that statement:
“reinstate a citizenship question on the 2020 census in response to the Department of Justice’s request for better citizenship data, to protect voters against racial discrimination.” (Judge ruled that this was pretextual – and the timeline for this “request” did not line up with when the decision was made.)
Not only has the government asked a citizenship question in the census for most of the last 200 years, (wrong – it hasn’t been part of the decennial survey since prior to WWII. It’s only been part of the American Community Survey over the last 60 years) 41 million households have already answered it on the American Community Survey since 2005. (Different group of people answer this survey. Apples/oranges)