“The court’s action will cause irreversible damage to efforts to achieve a fair and accurate census,” said Kristen Clarke, the president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which represents many of the parties that sued. “The commerce secretary’s next steps will tell us everything we need to know.”Cary Coglianese, a University of Pennsylvania professor who is one of the country’s top experts on administrative law, said the ruling was in some ways unsurprising. “Whatever one makes of the policy impacts underlying the Trump administration’s position on the timetable for finishing the census,” he said, “today’s ruling does generally fit with the court’s longstanding deferential posture” toward actions by federal agencies. The legal battle has focused on whether the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, had followed federal law when it set the Sept. 30 deadline. But the subtext has always been whether a curtailed count would be accurate enough to set the baseline for allotting political power and trillions of dollars over the next decade — and whether Mr. Trump was seeking to take control of the count for political advantage.

Source: New York Times October 13, 2020 21:11 UTC