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US President Donald Trump said on Thursday that he wants to delay the 2020 US Census following a Supreme Court ruling that blocked his administration from asking on the form if a person is an American citizen.
In a 5-4 vote, Chief Justice John Roberts joined with the Supreme Court's liberal bloc on Thursday to reject the Trump administration's justification for adding the citizenship question. He wrote that the explanation offered by the administration for adding the question "appears to have been contrived." But he left open the possibility that it could provide an adequate answer and sent it back to the lower courts for further consideration.
After the Supreme Court decision, Trump tweeted: "Seems totally ridiculous that our government, and indeed Country, cannot ask a basic question of Citizenship in a very expensive, detailed and important Census, in this case for 2020."
"I have asked the lawyers if they can delay the Census, no matter how long, until the United States Supreme Court is given additional information from which it can make a final and decisive decision on this very critical matter," wrote Trump, who was in Japan for the Group of 20 summit. He sent the tweet about 2:30 a.m. local time.
The Commerce Department set a deadline of June 30 — this coming Sunday — to finalize the forms and send them to the printer. A Census Bureau official has testified that in an emergency, with "extraordinary effort," the bureau could finalize the forms as late as Oct 31 and still print them in time for the Census to begin in the spring.
The US Constitution mandates the taking of a census every 10 years, and the data is used to allocate billions of dollars in federal funding and the apportionment of the House of Representatives.
The Trump administration had argued that the question was needed to enforce the Voting Rights Act. But opponents of the question said asking about citizenship would cause non-citizens and immigrants to skip the question or the census altogether, leading to an inaccurate count of the population when drawing new congressional districts.
Census Bureau's experts have predicted that millions of Hispanics and immigrants would go uncounted if the census asked everyone if he or she is an American citizen.
The high court ended its 2019 Session on Thursday with another politically charged ruling: drawing congressional voting maps in the US to tilt political power in favor of one party isn't something a federal court should referee.
In a 5-4 vote, the court's conservative justices ruled that federal courts have no role to play in the practice known as partisan gerrymandering.
The decision could embolden political line-drawing for partisan gain when state legislatures undertake the next round of redistricting following the 2020 census.
The court considered whether the Republican-led state legislature of North Carolina violated the Constitution when it gerrymandered the state's US House of Representative districts to artificially inflate the power of Republican voters.
Roberts wrote for the court that unfair maps are an issue in gerrymandering, but he said voters and elected officials should be the arbiters of what is a political dispute, that the question of what constitutes gerrymandering is beyond the court's reach, because there are no adequate standards by which to judge which maps are and are not acceptable.
"We conclude that partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts," Roberts wrote.
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