President Trump may be gone but the battles over the census haven’t ended.
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost (R) filed a federal lawsuit Thursday demanding that the Census Bureau stick to its statutory deadline of delivering redistricting data by the end of March. The Bureau recently announced that data won’t be ready until Sept. 30, because of snafus in the final stages of processing it caused by the pandemic and other issues.
Yost pointed to the Ohio redistricting process that was established in a constitutional amendment approved by the state’s voters in 2018. The amendment set out deadlines by which a redistricting commission draft state legislative and congressional maps.
Guess what, goober, your state’s constitution does not supercede the country’s constitution. Looks like your constitutional amendment (passed in anticipation of the 2020 census) is, er, unconstitutional.
You’ll have to live with gym jordans’s rubber ducky district for another year.
Add T** and Dillingham as individual defendants and ask for monetary damages to cover the cost of doing whatever it is Ohio is going to do because voter fraud and reasons.
However, passing that bill would not entirely moot out Ohio’s case. Yost is also alleging that the Census Bureau has violated federal administrative law in how it’s gone about postponing the release date.
Um, no. If Congress passes new legislation and Biden signs it, the new Federally-mandated deadline becomes the law. What the Census Bureau did before that time, whether it was in accordance with administrative law or not, becomes moot. If they violated admin law, a court could order them to go back to the original deadline. But a new statute would supersede that. There is no other remedy - the Bureau can’t be fined or jailed.
So the entire administrative machinery of this country is tied up trying to prevent one terrorist group called the Republican Party from destroying all norms and institutions.
The Trump administration tried to screw up the Census for the political benefit of Republicans, but by doing so they ran into the checks by the civil servants, which showed there are issues with the data. Which isn’t a surprise, that was the point…they were actively telling people not to count properly in specific areas. It’s going to take a bit to fix that, and Ohio can just wait until good data are available for apportionment and other Census outputs.
I mean, is it really important that they get good data, when they are just going to put together districts that cheat Ohio voters out of their democracy?
Why do people ignore the fact that we were, are, and will be for awhile in a global fucking pandemic? Some of what happened was Trump butting heads with COVID.
Besides trying to get it right, from the OH constitution, and the US constitution, we have to take into account everyone’s world was turned upside down by COVID.
(sorry if this sounds disjointed, but I’m watching a yearling(?) have the zoomies on my front meadow. even the other 3 deer that are with it are giving it the deer version of WTF eye)
