Trump Executive Order on Census Would Create Moment of Truth for Rule of Law

WASHINGTON - Paul Smith, vice president of Campaign Legal Center (CLC), released the following statement:

“American presidents have obeyed controversial court decisions, even if they did not agree with them, based on an understanding that to do otherwise would undermine the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution. By announcing plans to take unilateral “executive action” to add a citizenship question to the census, President Trump is disregarding that tradition. The right course for the administration would be to respect the decision made by the U.S. Supreme Court and abandon its plans to impose a citizenship question on the census. It would be a historic mistake to merely replace the dishonest rationale the administration used to defend the addition of the question with another improvised one, over the objections of census officials who have found that adding the question will decrease he accuracy of the census. If President Trump really intends to go forward with the citizenship question on his own authority, then the consequences of undermining our constitutional order will go far beyond the serious harms of a deliberately distorted Census.”