Trump administration asks Supreme Court to block order extending census count News
Photo credit: Stephanie Sundier
Trump administration asks Supreme Court to block order extending census count

The Trump administration filed an emergency request with the US Supreme Court on Wednesday in an attempt to conclude the 2020 census count immediately. The request asks the Supreme Court to block an order issued by the US District Court for the Northern District of California that prevents the Census Bureau and the Department of Commerce from ending the census count early.

The administration argues that continuing the census count through October will prevent the Secretary of Commerce from reporting the data to the President by the December 31 statutory deadline. The administration filed the request hours after a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit denied a similar appeal from the administration to reverse the lower court’s order.

The three-judge panel ordered the census count to continue through the original October 31 deadline. The Ninth Circuit found that “missing the deadline would likely not invalidate” the census data delivered to the President and that an extension for the statutory deadline “may well be approved by Congress after-the-fact, as has happened in the past.”

The administration’s emergency request filing to the Supreme Court asserts that the lower court’s order requires the Census Bureau to violate the December 31 statutory deadline of reporting census data to the President. The administration argues that the lower court’s ruling “constitutes an intrusion into the Executive’s ability to conduct the census” and that “courts should not order agencies to violate statutory deadlines.”

Further, the administration claims the lower court erred in declining to consider a sworn statement from the Census Bureau’s associate director, Al Fontenot. Fontenot stated if the census count continues, the bureau is not likely to produce “a complete and accurate census” by the statutory deadline because it will require the bureau to shorten the post-data collection processing phase.

The concern about the administration’s request to shorten the census schedule stems from the fact that doing so would likely produce inaccurate census data and impede the accurate redistribution of seats in the House of Representatives among the states based on their latest populations.

THIS DAY @ LAW

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail

On April 16, 1963, an incarcerated Martin Luther King, Jr. (arrested for demonstrating in defiance of a court order) wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail in response to a published statement by eight fellow clergymen from Alabama.

Part of the letter read: We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. Read the full text of the Letter.

Former communist countries admitted for EU accession

On April 16, 2003, the 2003 Treaty of Accession was signed by 10 countries, admitting them for European Union (EU) ascension. After Malta and Cyprus, eight of the ten new EU nations (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) were former communist countries. The signing of the treaty in Athens marked the first time that former members of the Soviet Bloc joined the EU.

Learn more about EU expansion from the organization's website.

More This Day @ Law... ▸