Associated Press: Judge says ending 2020 census on Oct. 5 may violate order

A federal judge on Tuesday said a revised Oct. 5 date the U.S. Commerce Department picked to end the 2020 census may violate an order she issued last week that cleared the way for the head count of every U.S. resident to continue through the end of October.

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh suggested she would be open to considering a motion of contempt against the federal government or a motion saying her order had been violated.

Last week, the San Jose, California, judge suspended the U.S. Census Bureau’s deadline for ending the head count on Wednesday, which automatically reverted the deadline back to an older Census Bureau plan in which the timeline for ending field operations was Oct. 31. Her order also suspended a Dec. 31 deadline for the Census Bureau to turn in numbers used for apportionment, the process of deciding how many congressional seats each state gets.

In her decision, Koh sided with civil rights groups and local governments that had sued the Census Bureau and the Department of Commerce, which oversees the statistical agency, arguing that minorities and others in hard-to-count communities would be missed if the counting ended at the end of September instead of the end of October.

The decision to end the 2020 census on Oct. 5, credited to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross on Monday, was built on the idea of turning in the apportionment numbers by Dec. 31 which violates her injunction, the judge said. …

The Washington lawsuit was brought by a coalition of cities and public interest groups, who argued the president’s order was part of a strategy to enhance the political power of Republicans and non-Hispanic whites. The U.S. House of Representatives later offered its support on behalf of the plaintiffs.

The Trump administration attorneys said the lawsuit was premature since it’s impossible to know who will be affected by the exclusion order before the head count is finished and whether the Census Bureau will come up with a method for figuring out who is a citizen.

But Gregory Diskant, an attorney for one of the plaintiffs, Common Cause, said waiting to challenge the president’s memo until after the apportionment numbers are turned in would create even greater problems.