Signaling just how dishonest and out of the ordinary its battle to get a citizenship question on the census is, the Trump administration has completely replaced the team of Justice Department lawyers working on the case. The change, which comes days after the original lawyers were in court claiming to have been blindsided by Donald Trump’s tweet saying the citizenship question effort would continue, was made without explanation, but it’s such a major and unusual move that there are few possibilities.
“There is no reason they would be taken off that case unless they saw what was coming down the road and said, ‘I won’t sign my name to that,’” according to former Obama Justice Department official Justin Levitt. What’s coming down the road is the Trump Justice Department arguing that the June 30 deadline it had previously claimed was necessary for printing the census is now flexible, while coming up with an entirely new rationale for the citizenship question, even as a federal court hears evidence that the real rationale was that it would be “advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.”
The Trump administration’s “’heads I win, tails we’ll see’ approach undermines confidence in both their ability to conduct the 2020 census and public confidence in the rule of law,” the groups fighting the citizenship question argued in court. “If any ordinary litigant engaged in such conduct, sanctions would be the minimum relief provided. And defendants are no ordinary litigants.”
With a whole new team of lawyers from an entirely different part of the Justice Department than federal programs—which is usually responsible for defending any administration’s policies in court—it seems likely that the Trump administration’s fight for a citizenship question is going to get even more dishonest than it has been thus far. Which, since its story has changed 10 times in four months, is saying something.