Media Center

The Census is the bedrock of our democracy, and we cannot afford to politicize the count. But that is exactly what political appointees to the Census Bureau are doing in reversing course and shortening the enumeration period against the recommendations of career staff who insisted they required additional time to conduct an accurate census count during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Today, Common Cause filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia challenging President Trump’s July 21 memo ordering the exclusion of undocumented immigrants from the apportionment of seats in Congress. In that memorandum, the President purported to exclude those undocumented immigrants from reapportionment for the first time in our nation’s history, and ordered the Department of Commerce to assist him in that effort, in violation of both the U.S. Constitution and federal statutes. 

The U.S. Constitution enshrines a uniquely American invention: to conduct a Census each ten years to count every person living in the United States of America in order to determine representation in the Congress. Today, counting every person also ensured that $1.5 trillion in federal funding for critical resources like food assistance, medical supplies for COVID-19 recovery, youth programs, and affordable housing is also fairly distributed. Today, President Trump has issued a memorandum ordering the Census Bureau to exclude undocumented immigrants from the apportionment base used to allocate congressional seats following the 2020 Census. 

Yesterday, Senate Republicans removed a measure from the intelligence bill that would have required presidential campaigns to report attempts or offers of foreign election interference to federal authorities and then defended President Trump’s excuses and refusal to act on U.S. intelligence reports that Russia has been paying bounties to Taliban militants to kill U.S. Troops. The so called “Duty to report” provision on foreign election interference, was passed by the Senate Intelligence Committee with bipartisan support in June but was removed from the final National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) currently before the full Senate.

Last night Attorney General William Barr lied to the American people in an official Department of Justice (DOJ) press release announcing that Geoffrey Berman, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, was “stepping down” from his position. Berman responded quickly with a statement explaining that he had just “learned in a press release from the Attorney General tonight that I was ‘stepping down’ as United States Attorney. I have not resigned, and have no intention of resigning, my position[.]” 

President Trump’s executive order on police reform is a small but woefully inadequate step toward addressing the huge problem of police brutality which has spurred national outrage in the wake of the ongoing violence against Black communities. The scope of the problem demands comprehensive reforms, not piecemeal gestures from a man who stoked the fires of civil unrest with his inflammatory rhetoric in response to nationwide protests. This is the same man whose administration ordered a violent police assault on peaceful protestors in Lafayette Square to accommodate a photo op for the President.