On Tuesday the United States Supreme Court took President Trump’s side on stopping the census count early instead of allowing it to continue until the end of October.
The Trump administration had requested the nation’s high court suspend a district court’s appeal allowing the 2020 census to continue through the end of the month. the Trump administration made the argument that the head-count needed to end so the United States Census Bureau had plenty of time to crunch the numbers before a congressionally mandated end-of-the-year deadline for turning figures used for deciding how many congressional seats each state is allowed.
A coalition of local governments and civil rights groups had sued the Trump administration, claiming that minorities and others in areas of different communities that are harder to count would go uncounted if the census ended early. They said the census schedule was cut short to make room for an order from President Trump that would exclude illegal immigrants in the country from the count used to decide how many congressional seats each state gets.
The Supreme Court’s ruling came through an unsigned order with associate Judge Sonia Sotomayor being the only justice to oppose.
Sotomayor wrote, “The harms caused by rushing this year’s census count are irreparable and added that states will “suffer their lasting impact for at least the next 10 years.”
The coronavirus had a major impact on efforts to complete the census count on its original timeline.
Back in April, the Census Bureau came up with a plan to complete the count by the end of October and report the numbers that would be used to determine each state’s representative count by the end of April of next year. The numbers also determine how many Electoral College votes each state receives. Even though the proposal was passed through the House it was not taken all the way up in the Senate.
The administration later reserved course and said in August that it would cut off the census count by the end of September in order to submit those numbers on December 31.
