Suprem Court Says Census Can be Halted By The Administration

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday stopped the Census count of every U.S. resident from continuing through the end of October. A lower court had ruled earlier that the census should continue until the end of October.

The Trump administration had asked the nation’s high court to suspend a district court’s order permitting the 2020 census to continue through the end of the month. The administration argued that the head count needed to end so the U.S. Census Bureau had enough time to crunch the numbers before a congressionally mandated year-end deadline for turning in figures used for deciding how many congressional seats each state gets.

Ending the counting early would allow the current administration to control the reporting of the census results even if President Trump was to lose the election in November.

In July, President Donald Trump issued a memorandum to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross ordering him to exclude undocumented immigrants from the census.That memorandum is also the subject of legal challenges at this time.

The Administration argued “Congress has vested discretion in the Secretary to determine, subject to the President's supervision and direction, how to conduct the decennial census,” the administration said in its request for Supreme Court review of the lower court ruling.2 “If that judgment is not stayed or expeditiously reversed, then both the Secretary and the President will be forced to make reports by the relevant statutory deadlines that do not reflect the President’s policy decision

In a dissenting opinion in the unsigned order Justice Sonia Sontomayor wrote, “Moreov.er, meeting the deadline at the expense of the accuracy of the census is not a cost worth paying, especially when the Government has failed to show why it could not bear the lesser cost of expending more resources to meet the deadline or continuing its prior efforts to seek an extension from Congress,” 

You can read the Supreme Court's Decision here.

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Submitted by New Fairfield, CT

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