CENSUS/CITIZENSHIP/JUSTICE DEPARTMENT/SUPREME COURT/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “President Donald Trump’s fight to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census is one he seems likely to lose. Eleven days after an unfavorable Supreme Court ruling, a new team of Justice Department attorneys must persuade three district court judges that a June 30 printing deadline a previous DOJ legal team insisted had to be met no longer applies — even though, the Commerce Department said last week, the questionnaires are being printed already. To pass muster with the Supreme Court, the new DOJ team must find a rationale that the high court will rule consistent with regulatory law and also believable — a tough assignment given that the court said in its ruling that the previous rationale was not…But that effort has been undermined repeatedly by Trump, who last week appeared to concede that his purpose was political. ‘Number one, you need it for Congress, you need it for Congress, for districting,’ he said last week. ‘You need it for appropriations — where are the funds going? How many people are there? Are they citizens or are they not citizens?’ (Districting and appropriations decisions are in fact based on the census’s raw population numbers, not on any citizen count.)”
–Ted Hesson and Josh Gerstein, “Why Trump will likely lose the census citizenship fight,” Politico, July 8, 2019 6:50 pm