[direwolf]

Trump's obsession with trying to omit immigrants from the census count could have a pretty devastating effect on the election if it's allowed to go through. Thankfully there are multiple lawsuits and challenges being filed, which will hopefully tie it up in the courts for eternity.


https://www.npr.org/2020/07/24/89432...y-census-count

The legal fight is heating up over President Trump's call to make an unprecedented change to the population numbers used to divide up seats in Congress among the states.
Trump now faces a total of three new federal lawsuits that are joining ongoing legal challenges surrounding the 2020 census.

A fourth lawsuit may be coming from California State Attorney General Xavier Becerra's office, which is planning to file a complaint against the Trump administration, Sarah Lovenheim, an adviser to Becerra, tells NPR.

Groups led by Common Cause, a government watchdog group, launchedthe first federal lawsuit this week. Their complaint was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Thursday, two days after Trump issued a memo calling to exclude unauthorized immigrants from the constitutionally mandated count of every person living in the country that is used to redistribute seats in the House of Representatives.

On Friday, a New York state-led coalition of 20 states, plus some cities and other localities, filed a challenge in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. In their complaint, which cites NPR's reporting, the challengers allege constitutional violations, as well as a claim that the administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act by making an "arbitrary and capricious" decision to exclude unauthorized immigrants from the apportionment count when they don't have the data to reliably do so.

The Constitution — which empowers Congress, not the president, with final authority over the census — requires a once-a-decade count of the "whole number of persons in each state" to determine how to reapportion congressional seats and, by extension, Electoral College votes.

Trump, however, has ordered information to be produced that would allow him to exclude the number of immigrants living in the U.S. without authorization from the latest state population counts that the president is legally required to deliver to Congress after the census is complete.

"It's another election-year tactic to fire up his base by dehumanizing immigrants and using them as scapegoats for his failures as a leader," said New York State Attorney General Letitia James in a written statement. "No one ceases to be a person because they lack documentation, which is why we filed this lawsuit."

If unauthorized immigrants are left out of the apportionment count, California, Florida and Texas are each likely to end up with one less House seat, while Alabama, Minnesota and Ohio are each likely to hold onto a seat they would have otherwise lost after the 2020 census, according to estimates the Pew Research Center released on Friday.

Among the other plaintiffs in Common Cause's lawsuit are the cities of Atlanta and Paterson, N.J., a refugee advocacy organization based in San Diego called Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans, and a group of individual U.S. citizens who live in New York and Florida — all of whom allege that because they are in areas with an "above-average number of undocumented immigrants," Trump's memo would hurt their rights to fair representation in Congress.