Trump admin asks Supreme Court to block Ross deposition in 2020 Census case
SOURCE: THE HILL
BY: LYDIA WHEELER
The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to temporarily halt an order requiring Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and another official to sit for a deposition regarding their decision to add a question about citizenship to the 2020 Census.
In a request filed with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Wednesday, Solicitor General Noel Francisco asked that the Supreme Court put the district court ruling on hold. That ruling, Judge Jesse Furman, on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, required John Gore, the acting assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, to sit for a deposition in a lawsuit challenging the administration’s decision to allow a question about citizenship to be added to the 2020 Census.
Francisco argued that the ruling compels the depositions of the two executive branch officials and expands discovery beyond the administrative record.
Furman’s ruling came last month in a pair of lawsuits that have been consolidated — one lawsuit was brought by 17 blue-leaning states, the District of Columbia and several cities, and another lawsuit was brought by the New York Immigration Coalition, Casa De Maryland, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, ADC Research Institute and Make the Road New York.
The lawsuit argues that the additional question will deter people in predominantly immigrant communities from responding to the census, resulting in skewed numbers.
Census results are used to redraw House districts. The number of House seats each state receives plays a part in determining each state’s number of electoral votes.
But Francisco argued in his request to the Supreme Court that the question is not new, insisting that questions seeking citizenship or birthplace information were part of every decennial census from 1820 to 1950, except 1840, and from 1960 through 2000.
Francisco said challengers’ claim that the question will reduce self-response rates is merely speculative.
Allowing the depositions to go forward, he said, would allow the challengers to “go beyond the administrative record to probe the secretary’s mental state in this APA [Administrative Procedure Act] challenge, contrary to this court’s precedents and bedrock principles of judicial review of agency action,”
“The court’s orders compelling the deposition of a cabinet secretary and assistant attorney general also raise serious separation-of-powers issues,” he said.