Donald Trump has sent his minions out from the White House to find multiple ways for him to undermine the voting process. He installed a new postmaster general at the US Postal Service who immediately began removing and demolished very expensive rapid sorting machines. He called on White Supremacists such as The Proud Boys to go to polling locations and watch for “cheating.” Then, there is Wilbur Ross.
The U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh started contempt of court proceedings at a Tuesday hearing. She alleged that the Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross defied her order to continue taking the census until November 1. Ross has to appear before her Friday.
The contempt charges were directed toward both the Commerce Department and its secretary after the US Census Bureau and Ross tweeted October was their “Target date” to wrap up the self-response and field data collection for the 2020 census.
August Flentje, an attorney for the Commerce Department, expressed frustration about her order to provide administrative documentation on why Ross designated Oct. 5 as a “target date.” He told Bloomberg News:
‘To call this a contempt situation is not reasonable. We need significant time to address something that weighty.’
The attorney called Koh’s labeling the October 5 target date as a “decision.” He described it as “contingency planning for the re-imposition of the December 31st date.”
Koh bit right back. She said she did not care if it is labeled a “pickle” or a “banana.”
‘I’m not invested in what you call it, but I think it’s inconsistent with what I ordered last Thursday.’
In addition, several civil rights and activist groups have already sued the White House, including Ross” for prematurely halting the census data collections on September 30 versus the original date of October 31. Their argument was that this would mean minority groups would be “undercounted.”
As a result of Judge Koh’s finding, the Trump’s White House appealed the case in a higher court.
Koh had been demanding that Ross was wrongly ending the Census process by December 31 versus the more appropriate April 2021 date.
In a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report last month, the GAO indicated that Trump’s decision to change the deadline would risk a number of inaccuracies.
The president signed an executive order to illegally exclude undocumented immigrants from the census. The reason behind it was that these numbers are the basis for the congressional district apportionments.
Before Koh’s order and earlier in September, a federal court ruled that this order was not legal. The GAO published its report to provide evidence that cutting the 2020 census would certainly lead to many mistakes.
Not only that, the GAO proved that shortening the timeframe would put unreasonable pressure on “IT system door knockers.” It would shorten how much time the organization had for testing the “response processing operation.”
‘These delays, the resulting compressed timeframes, implementation of untested procedures, and additional challenges such as COVID-19 could adversely impact downstream operations, escalate census costs and undermine the overall quality of the count.’
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Featured image is a screenshot via YouTube.
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