Judge Deals a Blow to Effort to Block Census Citizenship Question at Supreme Court

A longshot bid to get bombshell evidence before the court will have to wait.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross listens as President Donald Trump speaks at the White House on August 27, 2018.Alex Brandon/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

After the startling news broke last week that Tom Hofeller, the architect of Republican gerrymandering efforts, was behind the push to add a question about US citizenship to the 2020 census, the plaintiffs challenging the question asked a federal court to sanction two former Trump administration officials for allegedly lying about Hofeller’s involvement. Their longshot hope was that a federal court in New York, which in January struck down the citizenship question, would quickly rule in their favor, amending the court record to get the new evidence before the Supreme Court before it issues a ruling by the end of June.

But Judge Jesse Furman of the Southern District of New York made clear at a hearing on Wednesday afternoon that that wouldn’t happen. He called the charges brought by the ACLU “serious, not frivolous, as the defendants claim,” but said he would not decide the merits of the sanctions until after the Supreme Court issues its ruling.

Furman said he was “acutely mindful” of the Supreme Court’s coming ruling but didn’t have the power to alter the facts of the case, despite the bombshell new evidence. He ordered more legal briefings over the summer on whether to issue sanctions against Trump transition team member Mark Neuman and John Gore, the Justice Department’s former assistant attorney general for civil rights. “The issues raised do not lend themselves to a quick or rushed solution,” Furman said.

The New York Times first reported last week that Hofeller wrote an unpublished 2015 study finding that a citizenship question would be “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites” for the purposes of drawing new political districts. Hofeller then ghostwrote part of a memo urging the Trump administration to adopt the citizenship question. Neuman gave that memo to Gore, who drafted the Justice Department letter that the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, used as justification to add the question. The ACLU says that both Neuman and Gore sought to hide Hofeller’s involvement when they testified under oath in the case.

The Supreme Court can still consider the new evidence outside the legal record in the case, but the justices have already heard oral arguments in the case and may have already made up their minds.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate