SCOTUS OKs Donald Trump’s Census Plan

The Supreme Court has allowed President Donald Trump’s deputies to complete the once-in-a-decade national census in time for a scheduled December 31 report to the President.

NPR reported that the court’s unsigned order effectively killed a lawsuit by left-wing groups that sought to extend the census count into 2021:

The high court’s order on Tuesday, following an emergency request the Justice Department made last week, helps clear the way for President Trump to try to alter the count while in office by excluding unauthorized immigrants from the numbers used to reallocate congressional seats and Electoral College votes for the next 10 years.

…

… if the commerce secretary, who oversees the bureau, were to present the new state counts to the White House by Dec. 31, that would ensure that even if Trump did not win reelection, he could attempt to carry out the unprecedented change he wants to make to who is counted when determining the reallocation of House seats.

Only one of the eight judges publicly disagreed. Justice Sotomayor wrote: “Meeting the deadline at the expense of the accuracy of the census is not a cost worth paying.”

On October 7, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross explained the administration’s plans. He told NPR:

It isn’t a rush to finish. There is a statutory deadline of December 31, which Congress enacted quite a few years ago, in which, as far as I know, just about every census has completed in time for. The reason for that deadline is the apportionment material, which the President gives to the state, is then used to allocate congressional seats in state legislatures. And for the next ten years as well, it allocates federal funds.

Once the report is delivered, Trump is expected to exclude illegal immigrants from the once-in-a-decade recalculation of how many seats each state gets in the House of Representatives.

The reapportionment process, if approved by judges, would take House seats from California and Texas — both of which have swelled their populations with large inflows of illegals — and then transfer the seats to other states.

“We are already at – 99.7 percent of all the households have already been enumerated, and that’s a tenth of a percent better than in 2010,” Ross said.