Jay Michaelson writes:

This is what it’s like working for a madman:

Suppose you’re a lawyer at the Department of Justice. You’ve worked there for 16 years, serving Democrats and Republicans alike. And, in a contentious lawsuit about the census, you tell the judge that, following last week’s landmark Supreme Court decision, the government has abandoned its plans to change the census to ask about citizenship and is printing the forms without the question now.

Everyone verifies this is true: the Commerce Department, including Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross himself, the Census Bureau, and your colleagues at the DOJ.

Then, when you’re away for July 4 vacation, the president says that’s fake news.

The News Reports about the Department of Commerce dropping its quest to put the Citizenship Question on the Census is incorrect or, to state it differently, FAKE! We are absolutely moving forward, as we must, because of the importance of the answer to this question.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 3, 2019

What do you do?

If you’re Joshua Gardner, special counsel at the Department of Justice, you tell the judge—on the phone, after the judge read the tweet and asked for an impromptu hearing—that “I’ve always endeavored to be as candid as possible with the court. What I told the Court yesterday was absolutely my best understanding of the state of affairs… The tweet this morning was the first I had heard of the President’s position on this issue…. I am doing my absolute best to figure out what’s going on.”

So are we all.

Meanwhile, Gardner added, “the Census Bureau is continuing with the process of printing the questionnaire without a citizenship question, and that process has not stopped.”

The census controversy has officially degenerated from (averted) tragedy to farce.

The controversy, to briefly review it, centers on the Trump administration’s effort to add a question about citizenship status to the census form. That may seem innocuous on its surface, but the government itself estimated it would decrease Hispanic participation by more than five percent, leading to fewer government resources and less congressional representation in areas with large Latino populations—most of which just happen to be in predominantly Democratic states and districts.

Last week, the Supreme Court called Trump’s bluff. The court held that a citizenship question could, in theory, be valid, legal, and constitutional. However, Chief Justice Roberts continued, the government had lied, over and over again, about the real reason for adding the question to the census. That violated the law. [Continue reading…]