I can't believe that we're in a world where Wilbur Ross can just lie a) to Congress and b) about divesting investments that are affected by his position, and there will be zero criminal proceedings, blowback, or even attention paid to that corpselike, malingering fuck. But I suppose he got where he is by stealing from his partners and getting away with it, so more of the same.
(Also, I can't believe, but am in this instance *delighted* by, the provenance of those Hofeller emails. So great! Be good to your children, people, or they will blow up all your evil plans when you die! Just out of spite! I love her.)
I will never again criticize somebody for worrying about nothing in the political sphere. Have at it.
I'm glad to see this. I was MUCH more pessimistic based on my quick read of the ruling.
That said, another factor here is that the Census Bureau is also currently conducting a test of the question. So there will be (additional) empirical data in the next few months. As if we need more based on the voluminous existing evidence.
(If you really want to depress yourself, the NPR reporter in the linked article has a ton of old tweets with links to various documents, such as the Census Barriers, Attitudes, and Motivations (BAMS) findings, in which last year people were already spontaneously volunteering to survey-takers that they were terrified of providing info.)
Also, an LGM commenter reported getting one of the test forms, so it is actually happening, in case anyone was feeling particularly cynical.
Does anyone have a link to a good write up on the Maryland case?
Yes, thanks. All very interesting.
I don't think the test of the question is terribly meaningful. Presumably, Commerce is trying again to game the system in some fashion. (It is vexing to me that NPR writes this up with the baseline assumption that the agency is acting in good faith, when the assumption should be the opposite.)
I guess Roberts has backed himself into a corner here. To rule in favor of Commerce now, he's really going to have to blatantly ignore the facts of the case. It will be an interesting test of the rule of law.
8 I don't think anyone is really expecting Roberts to rule again, on the 2020 census anyway. The question is whether Commerce can put together a record that gets them a win at the district court. Given that the SC has already decided that having the question is ok, from an APA perspective anyway, if only Commerce can run a process on remand that is at least plausibly honest, I'm not as optimistic about the APA case as LB's far more knowledgeable colleagues seem to be. The constitutional case is still alive, and might get the question ruled out.
I am also vexed by journalists according a presumption of good faith. The President wears the bad faith of every administrative thing he does as a badge of honor. His following loves that it's all bad faith all the time. Having the liberal establishment media pretending that it's good faith just adds to the frisson of getting away with blatant bad faith.
Thanks for this analysis -- it's been hard figuring out the significance in the press reports and I couldn't make heads or tails of the actual decision.
Is there a specific time/date at which we will know, definitively, that the question will NOT be in the census? And if (pleasepleaseplease) the question is NOT in the census, how can ordinary citizens support education efforts so that underrepresented communities feel safe to answer the census? I'm guessing education efforts are part of every census, but I'm thinking that this bad-faith campaign to put the question in may have already achieved part of its goal to sow fear and mistrust in the process.
I would be absolutely surprised by a win in the district court. Remember, they don't have to come up with a rationale that looks rational from scratch, they have to come up with a rationale that looks rational and truthful in light of the already existing record. That's hard enough that they'd need a Republican hack judge to help, and Furman is the farthest thing from that.
If they are in fact able to push the deadline back, is there any chance of tactical delay in the district or appeals courts to miss that deadline too? Or is SCOTUS likely to take up the case whenever needed, over the heads of the lower courts if necessary?
The deadline for printing census forms had to be bullshit. They have to get over a billion pages of documents out to mailing addresses in 50 states by April 1, 2020. A few years ago The New York Times did almost that much every Saturday night. March 1 would probably be adequate.
Also, it has to be in 2020, but doesn't have to be on April 1 if there's an emergency. It they made it June 1 instead, there would be a bonus effect for Republicans of college towns having lower populations (not totally clear who would benefit from that on the legislative apportionment level, but less money for college towns for any funds distributed by population).
Wilbur Riss doesn't have to admit he lied. He only has to say that the newly discovered documents reminded him that he had a second motivation, which was (as stated in the main post) to permit states to reapportion on the basis of a citizen only count if the chose to do that. The District Court would reject, the Supreme Court would permit.
I had no idea that the census is mandatory.
I also have no memory of ever participating in one, but I don't think that means much.
I don't remember filling one out either, but I must have.
|| It's probably just because I took a pretty good whack to the head a couple hours ago, but those Unwanted Ivanka photos on Twitter are funnee. |>
The deadline is not bullshit, although there is probably enough time to push it until early fall. It's not just one form -- it's dozens and dozens of different documents used for outreach and education, including forms and instructions in many different languages. A competent Census Bureau would be in better shape to handle this, but this crowd has already managed to MASSIVELY screw up the procurement process for printing once already.
If you don't want to click the link, they awarded a $61 million contract through a deeply corrupt process to a company that filed for Chapter 11 just four months later.
(Of course there are very good civil servants in the lower levels of Census, but the highest-ranking decent human being retired last year and AFAICT has been working very hard as an informed advocate from the outside ever since.)
There is also an enormous hiring process -- 500,000 workers during the 2010 Census, a little less this time around -- and those folks have to be trained on how to administer the survey. The training will be importantly different if the Census includes a citizenship question vs if it does not. Hiring started a while ago but will kick into very high gear in September.
This is also going to be the first-ever Internet-first census, so there's a lot of stuff to be worked out about the electronic survey administration. The forms are likely to be fine enough on desktop/laptop computers and even tablets, but I haven't seen any convincing evidence that they're going to work well on smart phones. That's regardless of the citizenship question's presence or absence, but it adds another variable to the hiring/training process and could slow things down even more.
Finally, the Census actually starts in January 2020 in Alaska in remote villages. April 1 is just the reference date, and most of the country will be getting their first mailings (telling them to go to the website and input their responses) in March 2020. Only if they don't respond to the first two mailings will they get a paper form.
The most helpful thing that any interested individual can do is to reach out to their state/city's Complete Count Committee and see what help they need. Unfortunately there is enormous variation from place to place in how well-funded and competent these are (surprise surprise, big cities and blue states are investing more) but they're definitely your best bet.
Finally, the Census is mandatory for individuals, but completed by one person per household. If you are not the person in your household who tends to handle paperwork, it's entirely possible that your parent/spouse/roommate/partner did it without telling you.
I was a census taker for the 1980 census, Summer between high school and college, I was 17 and didn't have a car so I rode my bike. Totally awesome Summer job -- recommend to anyone looking for Spring/Summer work next year, including grad students and grownups too. The job was knocking on every doorm that hand't mailed in a form or hadn't filled in out correctly, asking people mildly personal questions, like when they were born, how man people in their family, whether anyone lives in that vacant lot next door . . .
Especially fun for a potential history major. Like, it wasn't a surprise that every single male born 1915-1925 or so served in the mlitary, much lower percentage before or after, but it wasn't something I had thought about much.* And although I was generally aware of the Great Migration, it had not occurred to me that every African-American born before 1950 living in a central New Jersey factory town would have been born in the South. In this town, almost all from three rural counties in South Carolina. Almost all of the Spanish speakers in the factory town were from a particluar region of Puerto Rico and had arrived inhte past five years. Several successful, assimilated middle aged immigrants in my suburban home town had unexpected (to me) emotional reactions to saying where they were born; one holocaust survivor pantomimed spitting after naming a village in Poland. One Asian-American said he had answered China on his entry questionnaire so he would stick with that -- I have no idea what he was getting at, or maybe he was just messing with me.
Highlight of my home town: I knocked on the door of the greek Orthodox Church, expecting to confirm it was a non-redisdential property and move on. The priest was very proud that his congregaton had sponsored a refugee from Greece who lived in the basement; he called the guy over and translated the interview. One more American accounted for!
Highlight of the factory town: An elderly Arican-ameircan man who lived in a tiny apartment in a terrible neighborhood invited me in and offered my a soda. He was lonely. On the long form, the place of birth question-- rural South Carolina , of course -- was followed by a question about the number of bathrooms. The proximity just set him off. He said that in rural County no one he know had a bathroom inside, not at home and not at the school, and people thought shitting inside would be gross (again, possibly messing with me). He first got to like inside bathrooms when he was drafted to be a navy cook, and after the war he went home and figured he'd never have that luxury again. Then he heard about the great factory jobs up North . . . A History of America in Four or Five Bathrooms, and a real believer in one version of the Americna Dream.
Anyway, shame on you reprobates who didn't fill out the forms. Someone had to try to go to your house, and if you weren't there they may have asked a neighbor for the necessary information if it wasn't the long form. Or maybe you were missed completely and don't really exist.
*The interesting qeusitons like birthplace and apporximate income were on the long form, which went to one household in six, randomly preassigned to addresses, that year. There is no long form this year.
19 is what makes me envious that I've never worked as an enumerator. This year I'm trying to talk a few friends into it, but apparently they won't hire people in default on their student loans (understandably), which will let out one of them. Bah.
Outlets are reporting that the administration is printing the forms without the question!
21: This looks convincing to me - https://twitter.com/Dan_F_Jacobson/status/1146156516787052544
The lawyers who worked on this should be proud and happy.
There is no long form this year.
What used to be the long form, and serves the same function, is now called the ACS -- American Community Survey. The Census Bureau sends it out to a sample of households every year now.
Wow. I'm always a little shocked nowadays when the good guys win one. Congrats to the good-guy lawyers!
Yes, there was no long form in 2010 either.
19 was really fun to read. Thanks unimaginative!
I have worked as a census enumerator (in Ottawa, Canada/aka Soviet Canuckistan). You go door-to-door; and you drop off the forms; and then you revisit a couple of weeks later to pick up the (supposed-to-be-completed) forms; and then you keep hassling revisiting until they fill out the damn forms. Compliance is supposedly mandatory, but not really; and lots of people manage to evade enumeration, to slip through the cracks.
My enumeration district was designated "bilingual" (English and French, in which two languages I can reasonably function), but I encountered many households where neither English nor French would do the trick.
😊
Also happy to be wrong about the court case too!
Is it paranoid that I still don't trust them to leave it off? Three months from now, oops, printer accidentally used the wrong .pdf and it's too late to reprint them.
Also any chance Pence's canceled travel plan was related to Trump having a tantrum about his staff making him concede the case?
Also any chance Pence's canceled travel plan was related to Trump having a tantrum about his staff making him concede the case?
Huh. That's a plausible guess.
Does this mean something else is going on? Or just that he's blithering meaninglessly again?
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/03/trump-says-absolutely-moving-forward-with-census-citizenship-question.html
Answer hazy, try again later. But Judge Hazel in the Maryland case (the one that was reopened to look at the Hofeller documents) called the parties in that case in for a conference this afternoon right after that tweet came out, so he's probably interested in an answer to the same question. By late afternoon we should know what the DOJ has to say about it.
Twitter thread for reference (Hansi Lo Wang, the linked NPR reporter, is the guy for census news): https://twitter.com/hansilowang/status/1146470351012073474
And the plaintiffs in Commerce v. NY, the case that went to the Supreme Court, have also requested a status conference.
I am more confident in both my guesses in 34 now.
Oh! Reverse again. Not sure the transmission can take much more.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/03/us/politics/census-citizenship-question.html
42: The astonishing thing is that the NYT story came to my inbox as a bulletin fully six hours after the president himself broke the news in a tweet. And it's not just the Times. The media has universally decided that 1.) The president can't be trusted as a source regarding his own future intentions and 2.) There is nothing particularly noteworthy about that fact.
The Times posted an editorial about how the census should proceed now that the administration had decided to drop the question. The editorial only noted in passing that the president himself denied that the administration had done this.
Well, the Supreme Court (in the Muslim ban cases) decreed that 45's tweets etc. didn't matter and couldn't be indicative of improper bias.
After a while it all seems to be government by Calvinball rules. Nothing but arbitrary and capricious.
It's the Observer Effect in action. Had the media not observed that Trump was backing down, he would have, in fact, backed down.
From a letter just filed by DOJ in Commerce v. NY:
On July 2, 2019, counsel for Defendants sent an email communication to counsel for Plaintiffs confirming that the questionnaire for the 2020 Decennial Census had been sent to the printer, without a question inquiring about respondents' citizenship status, and that the process of printing the questionnaires had started. ECF No. 610-3. That representation was based on the information undersigned counsel had at the time, and it remains undersigned counsel's understanding that the process of printing the questionnaires, without the citizenship question, continues. The Departments of Justice and Commerce have now been asked to reevaluate all available options following the Supreme Court's decision and whether the Supreme Court's decision would allow for a new decision to include the citizenship question on the 2020 Decennial Census. The agencies are currently performing the analysis requested, and, if they determine that the Supreme Court's decision does allow any path for including such a decision, DOJ may file a motion with the Supreme Court seeking further procedural guidance for expediting litigation on remand. In the event that the Commerce Department adopts a new rationale for including the citizenship question on the 2020 Decennial Census consistent with the decision of the Supreme Court, the Government will immediately notify this Court so that it can determine whether there is any need for further proceedings or relief.
DOJ may file a motion with the Supreme Court seeking further procedural guidance for expediting litigation on remand.
Is that a thing?
48: And you think developing any possible alternate path would take the government too long?
49: It's never been a thing before, but there are no rules now. Law? Precedent?
50: I don't think anything anymore.
I thought the whole point of the Supreme Court was that they were an oracle which issued vague guidance (or rather specific guidance about a given case with more vague guidance about how to generalize it) which had to be interpreted by experienced people and lower court judges.
Right. I have genuinely never heard of going back to the Supreme Court for additional guidance after a decision. Maybe it's happened before, but I don't know about it. I have no useful knowledge here.
Look, if Trump is going to go to the trouble of putting two judges on the Supreme Court, he's gonna expect them to work holidays.
The transcript from the phone conference was fascinating reading.
Not as weird as this but I was wondering if it had always been normal for multiple members of the majority to release their own statements explaining why they were concurring with the decision. I thought one judge was supposed to write the decision and that represented the majority. There seems to be a lot of concurrences now using very different reasoning from the official reasoning used in the decision.
That happens sometimes. Not super often, but it's not surprising at all.
The mental gymnastics required to take the president just seriously enough to follow orders but not seriously enough to have to take action when he issues threats of violence toward domestic opponents must be exhausting.
53: Didn't the Supreme Court explicitly say they wouldn't give guidance like that, in like the early 19th century?
20: I don't get that. The government would be able to garnish some of the wages and get paid.
The citizenship question will not be on the census.
My sources report jumpy, skittish, and disbelieving.
There's now a WP headline saying the same.