This is pure Trumpian thinking. If you don’t get a legal answer you like, just keep burning through courts and lawyers until you do. The legal team who attempted and failed to get a citizenship question on the 2020 census form was completely replaced by William Barr on Sunday. No explanation for the change was offered, and it’s being interpreted in a very dark light. New York Times:
“There is no reason they would be taken off that case unless they saw what was coming down the road and said, ‘I won’t sign my name to that,’” Justin Levitt, a former senior official in the Justice Department under President Barack Obama, said on Sunday. […]
The change in the legal team appeared to signal even deeper problems for the administration’s effort to put the question on the next census, a proposal that critics have assailed as an ill-disguised plot to manipulate the final head count in ways that would benefit the Republican Party.
The department’s lawyers had for months defended assertions by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross that the Justice Department sought the citizenship question so that it could acquire better data to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Three federal courts ruled that that explanation was clearly an excuse for some other goal, and last month the Supreme Court agreed, saying the question could be asked only if the department came up with a believable rationale.
So, it looks like that’s exactly what is going to happen. Somehow, some group of lawyers is going to have to cobble together a rationale that the court can swallow — and “but your Honors, this is red meat for the base” won’t cut it. And whoever performs this feat of legal prestidigitation, they won’t be lawyers from the department’s federal program branch, which is typically in charge of handling the administration’s policies in court. The federal programs branch is off the case. It would appear that once again, the credibility of the Department of Justice is being undermined by Trump pit bull and Roy Cohn surrogate, William Barr, who clearly perceives the DOJ’s role as implementing the will of his master, rather than upholding the rule of law. This does not bode well, to say the very least.
Can they be any more obvious?
It will be interesting to see how this goes down. The Supreme Court session is over now and I’m not sure, on a purely technical basis, how soon census question would have to be decided in order for it to make it to the census form. There may be problems on that mundane of a level. But the optics are terrible. This was a bad move, and I have no idea how Barr or Trump think that this is going to be okay.
Terrible optics dosn’t seem to matter to these people, judging on past behavior. They just come up with another covering lie.
They must be having all kinds of problems in DOJ, since some of the new lot are from the Consumer Protection section, which doesn’t normally have anything to do with the census. (Unless the rationale is that the Census Bureau is part of the Commerce Department. Which really has nothing to do with consumer protection.)
This might be the beginning of all kinds of insane rationales. It goes without saying that seeing the law tweaked this way and that makes me cringe. Seriously, I wonder if Barr and his minions are going to try to cobble new law together on their own, without the benefit of legislation. This scares me.
Actually, given the degrading quality of conspirators when Trump fails the first time and gets new people for the second attempt, I would say this bodes VERY well. He can replace lawyers as often as he wants. He can NOT replace the judges making the decisions here, who are the real key. Beyond that, name one sane person who wants to have their name associated with Trump at this point, ESPECIALLY in the legal profession.
He’ll always find people who are greedy.
But smart and skilled enough to the job? When it comes to this guy, highly debatable on a good day.
If trump was worried about impeachment right now due to impeachment inqury hearings or a bonafide impeachment hearing, he wouldn’t have time to constantly hatch new plans daily to undermine this democracy. But his chief enablers Pelosi and Schumer, et. al, are too afraid and aligned with the 1% to follow their Constitutional mandate. It’s all so disgusting.