The presidential debate is coming up on Tuesday, but there’s no question about this: Donald Trump heads the most hostile administration when it comes to diversity.
Here’s how much the issue doesn’t matter to him. He doesn’t even want to count us all in the Census, at least not accurately. It’s no different from failing to have a national testing policy for COVID-19. The president really prefers not to know—anything. Suppressing facts makes it easier to do whatever he pleases.
This is why we have the courts to thank, at least for now.
On Friday, Judge Lucy Koh of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California issued a preliminary injunction that bars the Trump administration from accelerating the Census deadlines.
The order prevents the Census count from ending early on Sept. 30 and allow data collection to continue until Oct. 31. The court also stopped the Census Bureau from delivering apportionment data at a sped up deadline of Dec. 31.
Given the pandemic, natural disasters like the California wildfires, and a Census workforce that was just 38 percent of what it had been in years past, accelerating the Census deadlines made no sense at all.
The fear of an undercount was just too real.
