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Congress holds officials in contempt over census question

Publish date: 19 July 2019
Issue Number: 4743
Diary: Legalbrief Today
Category: General

The US House has voted to hold two top Trump administration officials in contempt of Congress for failing to comply with subpoenas related to a decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. A report in The Guardian notes that the House voted 230-198 this week to hold the Attorney-General, William Barr, and the Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, in criminal contempt. The vote is largely symbolic because the Justice Department is unlikely to prosecute them. The action marks an escalation of Democratic efforts to use their House majority to aggressively investigate the inner workings of the Trump administration. Lawmakers say Barr and Ross refused to hand over key documents shedding light on the administration’s push to include the question about US citizenship on the 2020 census, after Donald Trump asserted executive privilege over them. Trump last week abandoned his bid to inject a citizenship question into the census, after the Supreme Court said the administration’s justification for the question seemed ‘to have been contrived’. Instead, Trump directed several federal agencies to try to compile the information using existing databases. Ross labelled the vote as nothing more than ‘political theatre’ intended to embarrass and harass the Trump administration. However, Elijah Cummings, the chair of the House committee on oversight and reform, defended the move. ‘We need to understand how and why the Trump administration tried to add a question based on pretext so that we can consider reforms to ensure that this does not happen again,’ he said.

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