Twitchy posted a great thread last week by attorney Gabriel Malor, who debunked a theory advanced by the ACLU and the New York Times alleging that the Trump administration’s decision to restore a citizenship question to the 2020 census was the result of a secret study by the late Thomas B. Hofeller that was found by his estranged daughter on his computer’s hard drive.
The case is now before the Supreme Court, and the plaintiffs are pushing that theory, which Malor calls a conspiracy theory.
A U.S. House of Representatives panel on Tuesday moved to hold two members of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet [Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross] in contempt of Congress for defying subpoenas in an inquiry into whether the administration’s plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census was intended to discriminate against racial minorities.
The Democratic-led House Oversight and Reform Committee’s action came with a major Supreme Court decision looming on the legality of adding the citizenship question to the census. The justices could rule as early as Wednesday after lower courts blocked the addition of the question as unlawful.
Also on Tuesday, the Richmond-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals gave the green light for a federal judge in Maryland to review recently disclosed evidence concerning the question. It includes documents written by a Republican strategist that administration critics said reveal the political motives for asking census respondents about their citizenship.
New wrinkle in census citizenship question case as 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sends case back to district court judge in Maryland so he can review new evidence/allegations re: racial bias claims
— Lawrence Hurley (@lawrencehurley) June 25, 2019
Recommended
In new letter filed at Supreme Court, Solicitor General says the equal protection/racial bias issue in the census case is "squarely before" the justices and should be dealt with in its ruling, which could come as soon as tomorrow
— Lawrence Hurley (@lawrencehurley) June 25, 2019
Daniel Jacobson is a former Obama White House lawyer:
It's hard to overstate how crazy a request this is. They are asking the Supreme Court to decide a constitutional claim that has NOT been briefed or argued in our case before the Supreme Court, in order to prevent a different court in MD from getting to the bottom of the facts. https://t.co/ogAgiUMm4a
— Daniel Jacobson (@Dan_F_Jacobson) June 25, 2019
And here’s Malor with further analysis:
This is too strong. The district court in the litigation presently before SCOTUS rejected the equal protection claim and DOJ did brief this.
DOJ explicitly wrote in its brief that the equal protection claim should not provide an alternative basis than the APA claim. https://t.co/AyJUfz3EkO
— Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor) June 25, 2019
This is from DOJ's brief. The evidence did not reveal discriminatory animus by Sec. Ross.
That is a question that various plaintiffs would like to reopen at the eleventh hour, despite there being no evidence that Ross was motivated by Hofeller's unpublished 2015 study. pic.twitter.com/OxTGgOaw3e
— Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor) June 25, 2019
If you're trying to catch up on this, the ACLU's new conspiracy theory in the census case goes like this.
(This may end up a thing when SCOTUS opinions go live tomorrow at 10am, btw.)
— Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor) June 25, 2019
The claim: a guy named Hofeller did a secret 2015 study that was motivated by anti-Hispanic (or anti-Democratic) animus. (Hofeller is now dead, so his motivation is an actually unknown and, importantly, this claim is unsupported by the actual text of the study).
— Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor) June 25, 2019
Hofeller corresponded with a guy named Neuman who consulted with Commerce on the census. (There is no reason to believe Neuman had anti-Hispanic motivations or caught some from Hofeller, but again, this is all unsupported.)
— Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor) June 25, 2019
Neuman corresponded with DOJ's Acting AAG Gore about the census. (Again, no reason to believe Gore had any animus or picked up something catching from Neuman.)
— Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor) June 25, 2019
And Gore wrote the letter to Sec. Ross that was in large part the basis of his memorandum adding the citizenship question to the census.
So to revive the equal protection question, you've gotta believe that Gore actually added the citizenship question because of Hofeller.
— Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor) June 25, 2019
That's what ACLU, courtesy the NYTimes, was blasting out a few weeks ago: a secret study! It infected everyone, and nobody mentioned it in the voluminous discovery in the case.
The problem: there is literally no evidence the study was the basis of the citizenship decision.
— Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor) June 25, 2019
To get around this little problem ACLU makes an additional claim: that DOJ and Commerce kept it secret in violation of discovery rules and the duty of candor to the court.
Here's the problem: DOJ actually disclosed Neuman's correspondence with Hofeller in discovery.
— Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor) June 25, 2019
Neuman's discussion of his correspondence with Hofeller takes up 30 transcript pages.
The claim that ACLU just became aware of Hofeller now is, to use a legal term, *le bull shit.*
— Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor) June 25, 2019
And I am particularly frustrated at how pathetically eager legal reporters are to parrot the ACLU's conspiracy theory.
As I said the other day. It's bad-faith lawyering and bad-faith journalism. And it's in service of a political motive. Damn shame.
— Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor) June 25, 2019
Speaking of bad faith journalism, here again is how Mother Jones is framing it:
At stake is whether Roberts will allow the Trump administration to rig American politics for the next decade by corrupting the census, and turn the Supreme Court into an unmistakable ally of the Republican Party and white power. https://t.co/Dm0MDChzrc
— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) June 20, 2019
And here’s a little movie the ACLU made about their conspiracy theory last November:
Our lawsuit has revealed the Trump administration's cover-up to rig the 2020 census. pic.twitter.com/caTEzUbIOj
— ACLU (@ACLU) November 2, 2018
“Opponents have called the citizenship question a Republican scheme to deter immigrants from taking part in the census in an effort to engineer a deliberate population undercount in Democratic-leaning areas to decrease the number of U.S. House seats held by Democrats,” Reuters reports.
Or maybe a citizenship question is a perfectly valid question to have on a census counting U.S. citizens.
Stay tuned …
Related:
‘Dirty lawyering in court and dirty journalism’: Gabriel Malor examines census citizenship question legal battle https://t.co/LJcHAfjXU3
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) June 20, 2019
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