The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on the legal battle to end census counting before the Oct. 31 deadline.
Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall sent on Wednesday an application for a stay to the Supreme Court allowing the Census Bureau to wrap up its data collection operations before Oct. 31 so that census data can be sent to President Trump by the statutory Dec. 31 deadline. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Census Bureau Director Steven Dillingham moved that deadline to April 30 in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic.
In the court filing, Wall asked for an administrative stay on a Judge Lucy Koh’s ruling in the Northern District of California that enjoined the Census Bureau from moving the deadlines on the grounds that “the Trump administration’s “stated reason for the August 3, 2020 Replan” is both “impossible” and would inflict unnecessary harm on the electorate.
The filing to the Supreme Court follows a Wednesday ruling from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that submitting census data to the president after the Dec. 31 reporting deadline “would likely not invalidate” the data and that if needed, the bureau “may seek and receive a deadline extension from Congress.”
The appeals court, however, only issued a partial stay on the matter. Although the court upheld the Oct. 31 collection deadline on the grounds that issues arising from a shortened collection period “would be impossible to remedy until the next census in 2030,” it found that “factors do justify a stay pending appeal” on moving the data submission deadline.
“Any harm from governmental attempts to meet the December 31 date are likely less irreparable than the injury from displacing the October 31 data collection endpoint,” the appeals court wrote. “Even if — as both parties aver — data processing cannot be completed by December 31 as a practical matter, that does not mean that missing the putative statutory deadline should be required by a court.”
The data submitted by the Census Bureau are used to apportion states’ seats in the House and Electoral College votes until the next census. States also use the data to redraw congressional district maps.
If the data is sent to Trump by the Dec. 31 deadline, he may be able to alter how undocumented immigrants are taken into consideration when apportioning House seats. Article 1, Section 2, of the Constitution does not specify whether House apportionment should be based strictly on the number of citizens in each state, and the 14th Amendment states only that “representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state.”
