Acting Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Ken Cuccinelli expressed confidence Sunday that the administration would succeed in appending a citizenship question to the 2020 census, insisting that President Donald Trump is “determined” to have the controversial query added to the document.
“I do think so.
I think the president has expressed determination,” Cuccinelli told “Fox News Sunday.”“He has noted that the Supreme Court didn't say, ‘This can't be asked.’ They said that they didn't appreciate the process by which it came forward the first time,” Cuccinelli said. “So the president is determined to fix that and to have it roll forward in the 2020 census.”
The Supreme Court ruled last month that the administration’s justification for tacking a citizenship question onto the census was inadequate, and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced Tuesday that the administration would be scrapping its plans to include the question on the decennial survey’s printed version. The Constitution requires the nation’s population be counted every 10 years.
But Trump
Cuccinelli, Virginia’s former attorney general, claimed Sunday he had no constitutional qualms with the addition of the question.
“I don’t have a problem with that at all,” he said. “I think that if you look at what we’ve asked over the years including of course the citizenship question, famously — asked many, many times through our history — we ask a lot of other information as well.
Besides counting the population, Cuccinelli said, “we find out a lot of other information that’s useful for governance.”
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine