by Eric Lendrum
The House Oversight Committee has sued Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross over the Trump Administration’s efforts to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, Politico reports.
The lawsuit demands that the administration hand over documents for which the committee has issued subpoenas, with Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) saying that “President Trump and his aides are not above the law.”
The move comes after both Barr and Ross were held in contempt of Congress by a House vote in July, after which the Trump Administration defied multiple subpoenas, including the ones issued in the census case. The Democrats’ efforts to target census documents is not related to the ongoing impeachment probe.
The attempts to add the crucial citizenship question back onto the census for 2020 were ultimately stopped by Chief Justice John Roberts of the Supreme Court, who sided with the court’s four liberal justices in an unprecedented betrayal of the Constitution.
In response, President Trump signed an executive order directing all other federal agencies to hand over any information they had obtained that could adequately document the citizenship status of all American citizens, for the similar purpose of weeding out non-citizens.
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Eric Lendrum graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was the Secretary of the College Republicans and the founding chairman of the school’s Young Americans for Freedom chapter. He has interned for Young America’s Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, and the White House, and has worked for numerous campaigns including the 2018 re-election of Congressman Devin Nunes (CA-22).
Photo “U.S. Census Worker” by U.S. Census.
