A planned vote to hold Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt of Congress may be on hold after President Trump announced the 2020 census would not include a citizenship question.
“We’ll see,” Pelosi said when asked if the House would move forward next week with the vote, as had been planned.
Pelosi said the decision about holding the vote would be up to Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings, D-Md. His spokesperson has not yet responded to a request for comment.
Pelosi made the remarks to reporters a few hours after Trump announced that he would leave the citizenship question off the 2020 census and would instead extract the count of those living here illegally from existing federal data.
The California Democrat said she was “jubilant” about Trump’s decision. The Supreme Court ruled last month that Trump could not include the question because the Department of Commerce had not provided a legally adequate rationale for including it.
The Oversight panel voted last month to hold Barr and Ross in contempt of Congress for failing to turn over subpoenaed material related to the decision-making on the citizenship question.
Pelosi said the threat of a House vote on contempt may have swayed Trump to drop the citizenship question.
“I think that the contempt of Congress message to some of his associates who were standing there with him,” Pelosi said, referring to Trump’s Rose Garden announcement Thursday. “The attorney general and the secretary of Commerce — probably, it was persuasive.”
