President Donald Trump asserted executive privilege this week due to information related to his administration’s decision to add a question about citizenship to the 2020 census. In response, the House Oversight Committee will two of his Cabinet members in contempt of Congress for defying its subpoenas for documents on the census question.
Trump’s intentions were announced in a letter to the Justice Department’s committee chairman Rep. Elijah Cummings, (D-MD) as the Committee was preparing to vote on a resolution on whether they should hold Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Attorney General William Barr in contempt for withholding documents on this issue. The House will determine if Democrats will be allowed to pursue both civil and criminal contempt charges against Ross and Barr for defying subpoenas issued by Rep. Cummings in April for the documents to be produced.
“What we have learned in this investigation is quite disturbing,” Cummings opened stated in his opening remarks that the committee obtained evidence that Ross was “aggressively pressing his staff” to add the question of citizenship to the 2020 census with the urging of the White House.
According to Cummings, this happened several months before the Department of Justice requested to have it included in the census. Cummings also indicates that the administration has claimed that it has supplied 17,000 pages of documents on the issue to the committee, but he has issue with those pages, “This is true,’ said Cummings, “but the vast majority of these documents were already public; others were heavily redacted.”
President Trump told reporters at the White House that he thinks “it’s totally ridiculous” not to include a question about citizenship in the census.
“Can you imagine you send out a census and you’re not allowed to say whether or not a person is an American citizen?” said Trump, while standing with the visiting president of Poland. “In Poland, they say they’re either Polish or they’re not. I think it’s totally ridiculous that we would have a census without asking.”
“But the Supreme Court is going to be ruling on it soon. I think when a census goes out, you should find out whether or not, and you have the right to ask whether or not, someone is a citizen of the United States,” the President added.
Others, like Rep. Jody Hice, (R- GA), a member of the Committee, said lawmakers do not think there should be a vote on a contempt resolution until the American people have a clear understanding of exactly why Democratic lawmakers are actually opposing the addition of the question to the census.
“The American people need to know what’s going on here,” said Hice. “Democrats simply don’t want to have a citizenship question, and it is important for us to ask why. We know that that question cannot be used for immigration enforcement. It cannot be used for deportation. These types of things are in federal law. So, the question is, why do the Democrats not want to know how many citizens are in this country?”
Rep. Cummings has been warned by the Department that it would recommend that President Trump assert executive privilege if the House voted to hold the officials in contempt of Congress. Rep. Cummings was also warned by Rep. Jim Jordan (R – OH) charging that he made a rushed judgement to hold the contempt vote and in doing so had violated committee rules in scheduling it, stating that Barr and Ross “have cooperated — and continue to cooperate — with your investigation.”
