by CHQ Staff
After a Supreme Court majority led by Chief Justice Roberts flubbed the ruling on the Democrats’ lawfare attack on including the citizenship question on the census Attorney General William Barr said Monday he sees a way to legally require 2020 census respondents to declare whether or not they are citizens.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Barr said the Trump administration will take action in the coming days that he believes will allow the government to add the controversial census query. Barr would not detail the plans, though a senior official said President Donald Trump is expected to issue a memorandum to the Commerce Department instructing it to include the question on census forms.
To that end the Justice Department is replacing the legal team that has been pursuing Trump’s efforts, putting in place a new team consisting of both career and politically appointed attorneys.
The new team, named in court papers, includes Deputy Assistant Attorney General David Morrell, a former Trump White House lawyer and law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas; Christopher Bates, who previously worked for Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, and four career Justice Department attorneys, Glenn Girdharry, Colin Kisor, Christopher Reimer and Daniel Schiffer.
According to the AP, James Burnham, a top lawyer in the department’s civil division who had been leading the team, had told Barr that a number of people who had been litigating the case preferred “not to continue during this new phase,” the attorney general said.
Barr said he didn’t have details on why the attorneys didn’t want to continue, but “as far as I know, they don’t think we are legally wrong.”
Barr said he has been in regular contact with Trump over the issue of the citizenship question. “I agree with him that the Supreme Court decision was wrong,” the attorney general said. He said he believes there is “an opportunity potentially to cure the lack of clarity that was the problem and we might as well take a shot at doing that.”
Translation: The civil servants at the Justice Department didn’t want to fight to win the citizenship question lawsuit and probably laydown and let the Democrats win the first time around.
The citizenship question on the census is not a controversial issue – except to the Democrat political class.
A Harvard University Center for American Political Studies/Harris poll reported by Jennifer Harper of The Washington Times found that 67% of all registered U.S. voters say the census should ask the citizenship question when the time comes. That includes 88% of Republicans, 63% of independents and 52% of Democrats.
Most notably, the poll found that 55% of Hispanic voters favor the idea.
Also in agreement: 74% of rural voters, 59% of black voters, 58% of urban voters and 47% of voters who backed Hillary Clinton in 2016. At 44%, liberal voters were the least likely to favor the citizenship question.
At the other end of the scale, wrote Ms. Harper, 92% of Trump voters and 90% of conservatives back the question.
On Tuesday, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway challenged why the citizenship question should even be an issue on the census — which makes a variety of personal household inquiries. She faults Democratic critics.
“The census is important, and as President Trump has mentioned, we spend about $20 billion on it. We have said it’s an important exercise. So why not get it right? The census in the past has been increasingly responsive to changes in American demography,” she continued.
“I would ask the Democrats —I hear they’re screaming rhetoric — I would ask what are you afraid of? Why wouldn’t you want to know who’s living in this country, and who’s a citizen and who’s not a citizen?” Ms. Conway asked according to Ms. Harper’s reporting.
One answer to Kellyanne’s question might be found in research from MIT Sloan and Yale professors published in 2018 that the number of illegal aliens in the United States is roughly twice as high as commonly believed.
The research found that the number of illegal aliens living in the country is about 22.1 million, nearly twice the most prominent current estimate of 11.3 million. Even using extremely conservative parameters, the study estimates a population of 16.7 million undocumented immigrants, nearly 50 percent higher than the widely-accepted population figure.
Despite anecdotal evidence that seemed to support it, think tanks and many Democrat politicians bashed the study as defective or biased, even though the researchers had no discernable political agenda. Were the census citizenship question to provide hard evidence the MIT Sloane and Yale numbers are correct it would provide irrefutable proof of the scope of the illegal immigration disaster that Democrats have imposed upon America.
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Photo “US Census 2020” by Virginia Association of Counties.
