The Census Bureau was told Tuesday evening to cease work on a directive from President Trump to provide the data that would allow the President exclude undocumented immigrants from congressional apportionment.
Easy to lose sight of this given everything else swirling about, but it is hugely important. Thank you to Tierney Sneed and TPM for delivering the real news.
One of President Biden’s first jobs, imo, will be to fire every single political appointee he can. Twitler has salted the federal government with his little butt-boys (and girls), in an effort to poison the reputation of the government even further. Time to clean house!
Blessings on civil servants which would also include, BTW, postal workers.
The move by civil servants effectively ends the bureau’s participation in Trump’s bid to make an unprecedented change to who is counted in the 2020 census numbers that will be used to reallocate each state’s share of congressional seats and Electoral College votes for the next decade. According to the 14th Amendment, those counts must include the “whole number of persons in each state.”
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the top Democrat on the Senate appropriations subcommittee that funds the bureau, issued a tweet criticizing Trump for making “a mission out of manipulating the census.” The senator said she will work with the Biden administration to “repair the damage Trump caused.”
One thing not mentioned in the article: IG Gustafson told Director Dillingham that (1) he had to respond to her letter, and (2) after receiving his response, she would decide whether or not the IG’s Office needed to interview him under oath.
Surprise, surprise, surprise. All of sudden the offending report dies.
As @cervantes so aptly put it: This is how to do it. (Emphasis added.)
I know, it’s like the sun has come out after a long and horrible storm.
(I envision him locked in the Oval Office private toilet, sitting on his golden throne, poking hopelessly at his phone, crying because it just won’t work any more!!
Keep maximum pressure on this crooked administration. With threats of prosecution and realization that Trump will not and cannot protect loyalists anymore, the grift machine will grind to a halt as the rats jump ship.
Indeed it is! And in 2021, even more states will have either fully bipartisan, citizen redistricting commissions (Colorado, Michigan), or citizen advisory panels for redistricting with greater judicial review
This feels like a milestone. @tierney thank you for investigating and reporting on this vital and wide ranging issue - for so very long now. Take a bow!
This is what erosion of power looks like in practice. At this point, it is a decent bet that Trump’s primary remaining source of power is the unpredictable and anarchic MAGA mob, rather than any formal authority in government.
The JCS effectively took away the nuclear codes, quite a few people still in office (both elected and appointees) are obviously ignoring his rants and commands, Congress has voted to impeach (again!), and he’s out of office in a week. And, his situation, once out of office, looks terrible. There’s not a bank in the world, outside of Moscow, that will do business with him, and it is likely that any money he has stashed around will go up in smoke as the debts and fines mount up.