US Supreme Court stops 2020 census from continuing for now
(AP) — The Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that the Trump administration can end census field operations early, in a blow to efforts to make sure minorities and hard-to-enumerate communities are properly counted in the crucial once-a-decade tally.
The decision was not a total loss
for plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging the administration’s decision to
end the count early. They managed to get nearly two extra weeks of
counting people as the case made its way through the courts.
However,
the ruling increased the chances of the Trump administration retaining
control of the process that decides how many congressional seats each
state gets — and by extension how much voting power each state has.
The
Supreme Court justices’ ruling came as the nation’s largest association
of statisticians, and even the U.S. Census Bureau’s own census takers
and partners, have been raising questions about the quality of the data
being gathered — numbers that are used to determine how much federal
funding and how many congressional seats are allotted to states.
After the Supreme Court’s decision, the Census Bureau said field operations would end on Thursday.
At
issue was a request by the Trump administration that the Supreme Court
suspend a lower court’s order extending the 2020 census through the end
of October following delays caused by the pandemic. The Trump
administration argued that the head count needed to end immediately to
give the bureau time to meet a year-end deadline. Congress requires the
bureau to turn in by Dec. 31 the figures used to decide the states’
congressional seats — a process known as apportionment.
By
sticking to the deadline, the Trump administration would end up
controlling the numbers used for the apportionment, no matter who wins
next month’s presidential election.
In a statement, House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi called the Supreme Court’s decision “regrettable and
disappointing,” and said the administration’s actions “threaten to
politically and financially exclude many in America’s most vulnerable
communities from our democracy.”
Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor
dissented from the high court’s decision, saying “respondents will
suffer substantial injury if the Bureau is permitted to sacrifice
accuracy for expediency.”
The Supreme Court ruling came in
response to a lawsuit by a coalition of local governments and civil
rights groups, arguing that minorities and others in hard-to-count
communities would be missed if the census ended early. They said the
schedule was cut short to accommodate a July order from President Donald
Trump that would exclude people in the country illegally from being
counted in the numbers used for apportionment.
Opponents of the
order said it followed the strategy of the late Republican redistricting
guru, Thomas Hofeller, who had advocated using voting-age citizens
instead of the total population when it came to drawing legislative
seats since that would favor Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.
Last
month, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California sided with
the plaintiffs and issued an injunction suspending a Sept. 30 deadline
for finishing the 2020 census and a Dec. 31 deadline for submitting the
apportionment numbers. That caused the deadlines to revert back to a
previous Census Bureau plan that had field operations ending Oct. 31 and
the reporting of apportionment figures at the end of April 2021.
When
the Census Bureau, and the Commerce Department, which oversees the
statistical agency, picked an Oct. 5 end date, Koh struck that down too,
accusing officials of “lurching from one hasty, unexplained plan to the
next … and undermining the credibility of the Census Bureau and the
2020 Census.”
An appellate court panel upheld Koh’s order allowing
the census to continue through October but struck down the part that
suspended the Dec. 31 deadline for turning in apportionment numbers. The
panel of three appellate judges said that just because the year-end
deadline is impossible to meet doesn’t mean the court should require the
Census Bureau to miss it.
The plaintiffs said the ruling against
them was not a total loss, as millions more people were counted during
the extra two weeks.
“Every day has mattered, and the Supreme
Court’s order staying the preliminary injunction does not erase the
tremendous progress that has been made as a result of the district
court’s rulings,” said Melissa Sherry, one of the attorneys for the
coalition.
Besides deciding how many congressional seats each
state gets, the census helps determine how $1.5 trillion in federal
funding is distributed each year.
San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo said
that his city lost $200 million in federal funding over the decade
following the 2010 census, and he feared it would lose more this time
around. The California city was one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
“A census count delayed is justice denied,” Liccardo said.
With
plans for the count hampered by the pandemic, the Census Bureau in
April had proposed extending the deadline for finishing the count from
the end of July to the end of October, and pushing the apportionment
deadline from Dec. 31 to next April. The proposal to extend the
apportionment deadline passed the Democratic-controlled House, but the
Republican-controlled Senate didn’t take up the request. Then, in late
July and early August, bureau officials shortened the count schedule by a
month so that it would finish at the end of September.
The Senate
Republicans’ inaction coincided with Trump’s order directing the Census
Bureau to have the apportionment count exclude people who are in the
country illegally. The order was later ruled unlawful by a panel of
three district judges in New York, but the Trump administration appealed
that case to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court decision comes
as a report by the the American Statistical Association has found that a
shortened schedule, dropped quality control procedures, pending
lawsuits and the outside politicization of some parts of the 2020 census
have raised questions about the quality of the nation’s head count that
need to be answered if the final numbers are going to be trusted.
The
Census Bureau says it has counted 99.9% of households nationwide,
though some regions of the country such as parts of Mississippi and
hurricane-battered Louisiana fall well below that.
As the Census
Bureau winds down field operations over the next several days, there
will be a push to get communities in those two states counted, said
Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’
Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, one of the litigants in the
lawsuit.
“That said, the Supreme Court’s order will result in irreversible damage to the 2020 Census,” Clarke said.