“Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers . . . . The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.”
End of story.
How is that “end of story”? An “actual enumeration” hasn’t been made.
The 2020 Census is the “actual Enumeration” being conducted in such manner as Congress has by law directed. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t change it.
There are a lot of good arguments that it hasn’t been carried out as directed by law. And Congress has rejected census finding before.
The existence of arguments about the shittiness of the 2020 census is inevitable. None of them will stand up to judicial scrutiny sufficient to prevent reapportionment from happening. And if Congress rejects the census for reapportionment purposes as it unlawfully did after 1920 because of outright and emphatic racism, the courts will not let them get away with it this time.
Other than that, your fantasy is not at all compelling.
The real question is whether the current Census can be reviewed and repaired under Biden as part of the same Census process.
There are legislative deadlines, one of which looks like it is going to be missed due the Trump unassisted (Dec. 31).
I do not know the legal import of these deadlines, if they can be extended, what happens (legally) if you miss one, and so forth.
No, it cannot, at least not for the constitutionally-mandated congressional reapportionment. Article I and the 14th Amendment are perfectly clear that reapportionment is done with the decennial census, as provided for by statute. There are no do-overs.
I am not talking about any “do-over” I am talking about continuing the work on the current census.
Yes that very same once-in-ten-year Article I census, the one that is still in progress right now, and which will be reporting results into April according to the current schedule and looks like it may miss its first deadline at the end of this year.
That one.
When does work on it have to conclude, and cannot Biden have its work audited and corrected as it is still underway?
The flawed data collection is already finished. It cannot be restarted or redone. Even if Congress were to pass a new law attempting to extend the 2020 census – which, to be clear, will never happen – it would undoubtedly be held unconstitutional in the courts for the very good reason that the census has to be conducted as provided for in advance by Congress, not as retroactively reverse engineered by Congress. And there is no fucking way that Trump is not going to have the reapportionment numbers in his hands and turned over to Congress by the end of his term. Anything other outcome is fantasy.
You only cite data collection. Much of the work that was rushed was analysis, and decisions on that were being made on the fly by the current administration, not due to any specifications in acts of Congress.
The final census numbers (for some purposes anyway) are not due until April, after the end of the Trump administration, so they cannot be handed over by Trump before the end of his term.
You mistake the final numbers for the reapportionment numbers, which are due to El Jefe’s big boy desk by December 31. There is no fucking way on this planet that Trump is not going to turn the reapportionment numbers over to Congress before he leaves office.
I have no idea what you’re on about. My point was that the Supreme Court majority doesn’t get the art part of the Census. I could add that it doesn’t want to both because of class-political biases and perhaps because some of them fear that statistical adjustment opens up a potential legal rabbit hole (after all, the product depends on who’s doing the adjustments, which is a legitimate concern, and one that those supporting adjustment should be thinking about in light of the Trump Administration experience in many other domains).