Trump officials missed their own July 1 deadline to print more than 1.5 billion copies of the Census, NPR reported.
Trump has not yet given up on his attempt to rig the next decade of elections to favor Republicans.
NPR reported on Tuesday that the Trump administration missed its self-imposed July 1 deadline to print the 2020 Census — the decennial population count that determines how congressional seats are apportioned.
The news comes after the Supreme Court blocked Trump from adding a racist "citizenship question" to the population survey — a question that was specifically designed to undercount minority populations to dilute Democratic power and help Republicans gain more seats in Congress and state legislatures.
The Supreme Court, however, did not permanently rule against the question, writing instead that the Trump administration's explanation of why the question was necessary didn't pass the smell test. The court sent the case back down to a lower court to rule on the actual reasoning — which we've since learned was specifically to benefit Republicans at the expense of Democrats.
And by not printing the census forms by the date the administration already claimed was necessary in order to meet their Constitutional obligation to conduct the Census in 2020, it's a sign that the administration is hoping the legal challenges can make it through the courts in time to place the racist question on the survey.
Delaying the printing of the forms, however, could put the administration at risk of violating the law, which mandates that the census count begin on April 1.
Trump already tweeted that he was asking his lawyers about violating the law by delaying the census in order to ensure that the citizenship question appears on the forms.
A former head of the Census Bureau told NPR that pushing off the printing of Census forms is "the biggest risk right now that you can see."
"The longer you delay, the more you're going to have to condense the schedule and the more expensive it's going to be and the greater the chance for errors to crop up," former Census Bureau Director John Thompson told NPR.
"There will come a time when there just won't be enough time," to print the forms, Thompson added. "There's only so many printing presses, and there's only so many hours in the day."
Of course, Trump has never cared about following the law. He believes he's above that and can act with impunity.
And delaying the printing of the census is a sign that he intends to break the law and not begin the population count when he's legally required to.
Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.
