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President Donald Trump on Wednesday branded as “FAKE” news reports that his administration was dropping plans to ask people if they are U.S. citizens on the 2020 census — despite officials in his own administration having said a day before that the question will not be asked.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and a Justice Department lawyer had both said Tuesday that the Census Bureau is in the process of printing the census questionnaire without the citizenship question.

Their statements came five days after a Supreme Court decision that effectively blocked the question being added to the 2020 census questionnaire.

But Trump, in a tweet Wednesday, said, “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,” Trump wrote.

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An official says the Justice Department has been instructed to keep looking for a way to ask 2020 census responders whether they are citizens of the United States.

The Supreme Court has left in place a lower court's order to block the question for now.

After the Supreme Court declined to allow the question, tweets by President Trump had sowed confusion about whether he planned to continue the legal fight.

The Justice Department statement came in a court filing released Wednesday. Assistant Attorney General Jody Hunt said, "We at the Department of Justice have been instructed to examine whether there is a path forward, consistent with the Supreme Court's decision, that would allow us to include the citizenship question on the census."

Although the Trump administration says printing of the 2020 census without the citizenship question has begun, the president's statements on social media have launched a flurry of court activity. That includes a last-minute hearing called by a federal judge who is presiding over two recently reopened lawsuits over the question in Maryland.

U.S. District Judge George Hazel is now giving the administration until Friday to decide whether it will enter into a written agreement that confirms it will no longer pursue including a citizenship question on census forms, plaintiffs' attorneys Denise Hulett of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Shankar Duraiswamy of Covington & Burling tell NPR. If the administration does not enter the agreement, the judge is prepared to start reconsidering recently resurrected discrimination and conspiracy allegations against the administration's decision to add the question.

Earlier this week, the administration gave signals that it was ready to stand down on its push to add to census forms the question, "Is this person a citizen of the United States?" A majority of the Supreme Court ruled last week to keep the question off the census for now given that they found that administration's justification appears "contrived."

On Tuesday, Justice Department spokesperson Kelly Laco told NPR that the administration had decided to print paper forms for the 2020 census without the question. That confirmation came shortly after DOJ attorney Kate Bailey shared the news in an email to attorneys representing the question's challengers.

Later, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the Census Bureau, said in a written statement: "The Census Bureau has started the process of printing the decennial questionnaires without the question."

The more than year-long legal battle over the hotly contested question seemed to be drawing to a close – until President Trump fired off a tweet suggesting he, at least, is not ready to give up.

"I have asked the Department of Commerce and the Department of Justice," he wrote, "to do whatever is necessary to bring this most vital of questions, and this very important case, to a successful conclusion."

The following day, he emphasized in another set of tweets that the administration is "absolutely moving forward" with a citizenship question, calling reports about the Department of Commerce "dropping its quest" to get the question on the census "incorrect" and "FAKE!"

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Update: Late Wednesday, the government asked a court to allow it to reconsider the issue. An attorney for the Justice Department told the court that the “tweet this morning was the first I had heard of the President’s position on this issue.”

“If you were Facebook and an attorney for Facebook told me one thing,” the judge later replied, “and then I read a press release from Mark Zuckerberg telling me something else, I would be demanding that Mark Zuckerberg appear in court with you the next time because I would be saying I don’t think you speak for your client anymore.”

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Originally posted by wtg:
That sounds about right.

From a WaPo piece:

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Update: Late Wednesday, the government asked a court to allow it to reconsider the issue. An attorney for the Justice Department told the court that the “tweet this morning was the first I had heard of the President’s position on this issue.”

“If you were Facebook and an attorney for Facebook told me one thing,” the judge later replied, “and then I read a press release from Mark Zuckerberg telling me something else, I would be demanding that Mark Zuckerberg appear in court with you the next time because I would be saying I don’t think you speak for your client anymore.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com...m_term=.018c318cfaf7

This. Is. Crazy.

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The Justice Department announced on Sunday that it was replacing the legal team defending the Trump administration’s effort to place a citizenship question on the next census, a change that is all but unprecedented in legal battles as consequential as the one over the 2020 head count.

The department said in a statement that it was “shifting these matters to a new team of Civil Division lawyers going forward.” It offered no explanation for the en masse change, which came on the heels of an extraordinary week in a yearlong clash over the issue that has raised concerns about whether the department’s arguments for adding the question could be believed.

And it strongly suggested that the department’s career lawyers had decided to quit a case that at the least seemed to lack a legal basis, and at most left them defending statements that could well turn out to be untrue.

“There is no reason they would be taken off that case unless they saw what was coming down the road and said, ‘I won’t sign my name to that,’” Justin Levitt, a former senior official in the Justice Department under President Barack Obama, said on Sunday.

Kerri Kupec, a department spokeswoman, cast the change in a positive light, saying in a statement that the lawyers had “given countless hours to defending the Commerce Department and have consistently demonstrated the highest professionalism, integrity and skill inside and outside the courtroom.”

Attorney General William P. Barr “appreciates that service,” she added, “and is confident that the new team will carry on in the same exemplary fashion.”

But according to a Justice Department lawyer who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, no lawyers from the department’s federal programs branch — which customarily defends the administration’s policies in court — would be working on the census issue. A senior official confirmed that federal programs was being taken off the case.

Lawyers who had been working on the case apparently concluded that they faced three problems. They had told the Supreme Court that they were up against a strict deadline of June 30 for printing the census forms, and there were difficulties in finding a new justification for the question that would not seem invented out of whole cloth. They may have also concluded that there was no way to move speedily enough to restore the question in any event, given that constitutional and statutory frameworks seem to require a lengthy administrative process before new questions may be added to the census.

The change in the legal team appeared to signal even deeper problems for the administration’s effort to put the question on the next census, a proposal that critics have assailed as an ill-disguised plot to manipulate the final head count in ways that would benefit the Republican Party.

The department’s lawyers had for months defended assertions by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross that the Justice Department sought the citizenship question so that it could acquire better data to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Three federal courts ruled that that explanation was clearly an excuse for some other goal, and last month the Supreme Court agreed, saying the question could be asked only if the department came up with a believable rationale.

The Justice Department abandoned the fight after that ruling, telling a federal judge that the battle was over “for once and for all,” only to be blindsided last week by President Trump, who said on Twitter that the statements were “fake.” Mr. Trump suggested that the head count could be delayed until he found a way to add the citizenship question, perhaps by printing an addendum that could be tacked onto the questionnaire.

That prompted a cascade of troubles. On Wednesday, Justice Department lawyers returned to a Maryland court that was hearing a case against the question to recant their admission of defeat. “The tweet this morning was the first I had heard of the president’s position on this issue, just like the plaintiffs and Your Honor,” Joshua Gardner, a lawyer working on the census issue, told Judge George J. Hazel of United States District Court.

Mr. Gardner and other department officials told Judge Hazel and a second judge in Manhattan overseeing another census lawsuit that the search for a way to place the question on the census would continue. But lawyers for opponents of the question pounced on that declaration on Friday, arguing that the Justice Department had insisted repeatedly — including to the Supreme Court — that it was essential to wrap up the dispute by the end of June, lest the census be delayed for lack of time to print questionnaires and other forms.

The Supreme Court relied on that deadline, the plaintiffs noted, in leapfrogging the legal appeals process to take the case directly from a lower federal court to a hearing before the justices. But having lost the legal battle, they argued, the Justice Department says there is ample time to hunt for some other way to achieve its goal.

The government’s “‘heads I win, tails we’ll see’ approach undermines confidence in both their ability to conduct the 2020 census and public confidence in the rule of law,” the plaintiffs argued. “If any ordinary litigant engaged in such conduct, sanctions would be the minimum relief provided. And defendants are no ordinary litigants.”

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Originally posted by wtg:
Prescience. I haz it.

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Originally posted by ShiroKuro:
smh. I can't bear the news anymore.

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A federal judge rejected a request by the Trump administration to assign a new legal team to a lawsuit that blocked the U.S. from adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman in Manhattan called the government’s request “patently deficient,” adding that the U.S. had provided “no reasons, let alone ’satisfactory reasons,’ for the substitution of counsel.” He said the government has to show that replacing the team won’t add further delay to the suit.

The ruling reflects Furman’s frustration with a Justice Department that initially rushed the case to the Supreme Court but is now scrambling to comply with President Donald Trump’s demand for a new legal strategy to salvage the citizenship query.

The Supreme Court put the administration’s plan on hold because, it said, its rationale for the query was “contrived.” The government had claimed the deadline for resolving the issue was June 30, to allow enough time to print for 2020.

“The Justice Department owes the public and the courts an explanation for its unprecedented substitution of the entire legal team that has been working on this case,” said Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project and one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers in the case. “The Trump administration is acting like it has something to hide, and we won’t rest until we know the truth.”

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Manhattan-based U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman wrote in a court order that DOJ’s motion earlier this week to replace its team of attorneys was “patently deficient” because the administration didn't provide any reason for the switch.

In a three-page order, Furman denied the motion and said any future withdrawals must be supported by a signed and sworn affidavit from each attorney stating the reasons for his or her withdrawal and pledging to honor any future court sanctions or mandated appearances.