Census Judge Defers to Supreme Court in Hearing on GOP Input

(Bloomberg) -- With the U.S. Supreme Court preparing to decide this month whether the government can include a citizenship question on the 2020 census, a federal judge in New York indicated he won’t rule before then on a related claim that a Republican consultant influenced the Trump administration’s decision to amend the survey.

U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman, citing a desire "not to interfere with the Supreme Court’s decision-making process," said in a 15-minute hearing Wednesday that he won’t rule quickly on a request to punish the government for allegedly lying about its motivations for adding the question.

Furman blocked the citizenship question in January after a two-week trial that the U.S. sought more than a dozen times to derail. The Supreme Court sped up consideration of the case, skipping over a lower appeals court, to produce a ruling in time to finalize the census before the surveys are printed.

Adding a citizenship question will discourage responses to the survey, resulting in an undercount of immigrant populations, opponents of the change have argued. The census is used to determine voting districts and the flow of federal dollars to local and state governments.

More Clout

The New York Immigration Coalition told Furman last week that consultant Thomas Hofeller, who died in August, concluded in a 2015 study that the citizenship question would ultimately give Republicans and white voters more clout. The immigration group argues its evidence shows the government falsely claimed it wants the citizenship data to help enforce the federal Voting Rights Act.

Furman told the lawyers in the packed courtroom that he wouldn’t immediately consider the substance of the allegations made by the coalition, but said they were "serious" and not, as the government claimed, "frivolous."

Because of the review by the high court, Furman said, he lacks the ability to issue any further rulings on the main issues, but can on "collateral" issues. He ordered the immigration group to file a formal request by July 12 and set up a briefing schedule that wouldn’t yield a ruling until after the Supreme Court has made its decision on the content of the census.

Furman also declined to allow the coalition to demand evidence on the sanctions question.

The case is State of New York v. U.S. Department of Commerce, 18-cv-02921, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan). The Supreme Court case is Department of Commerce v. New York, 18-966.

To contact the reporter on this story: Bob Van Voris in federal court in Manhattan at rvanvoris@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Steve Stroth, Peter Jeffrey

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