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Trump Considering an Executive Order to Allow Citizenship Question on Census Two Years Into Trump’s Presidency, Obama Remains a Top Target for Criticism
(about 8 hours later)
President Trump on Friday said he is “thinking of” issuing an executive order to allow for a citizenship question on the 2020 census, as his administration faced a midafternoon court deadline to say how it planned to move forward. WASHINGTON — It took all of one minute and nine seconds for President Trump to go after his predecessor on Friday — just one minute and nine seconds to re-engage in a debate that has consumed much of his own time in office over who was the better president.
Mr. Trump made the remarks to reporters on the south lawn of the White House, as he prepared to depart for his private club in Bedminster, N.J., for the weekend. It was former President Barack Obama who started the policy of separating children from their parents at the border, Mr. Trump claimed falsely, and it was Mr. Obama who had such a terrible relationship with North Korea that he was about to go to war. Mr. Obama had it easy on the economy, Mr. Trump added, but let America’s allies walk all over him.
Mr. Trump said he was considering four or five options about how to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census after the Supreme Court ruled that the administration’s rationale for creating such a question was “contrived.” Critics of the question say it would lead to an undercount of immigrants, which would affect how congressional seats are allocated and how billions of dollars of federal money are spent. The litany of criticisms, often distorted, are familiar, but Mr. Trump has turned increasingly to Mr. Obama in recent days as a political foil.
Since Wednesday, officials have been looking at the options to allow the question to be included. Mr. Trump has told advisers that a question could simply be added on after the questionnaires are printed. In part, that reflects Mr. Trump’s longstanding fixation with the former president. But it may also stem from the fact that Mr. Obama’s vice president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., remains the Democratic front-runner in the 2020 election.
“We’ll see what happens,” Mr. Trump said on Friday. “We could also add an addition on. So we could start the printing now and maybe do an addendum after we get a positive decision. So we’re working on a lot of things including an executive order.” “If you look at what we’ve done, and if you look at what we’ve straightened out, the — I call it the ‘Obama-Biden mess,’” he told reporters on the South Lawn of the White House before leaving Washington for a weekend at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J. “We’re straightening it out.”
The administration’s lawyers had told the Supreme Court that the deadline for printing the forms was June, while groups challenging the question said the forms could be printed as late as October, though at additional cost. The president’s focus on Mr. Obama after more than two and a half years in office was even more intense during a trip to Japan and South Korea last weekend, when Mr. Trump repeatedly raised the subject of his predecessor without being asked, assailing him on a variety of domestic and foreign policy fronts.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote the opinion last month in which the court rejected the Trump administration’s justification for adding the citizenship question but left open the possibility that it could present a better rationale. “When in a corner, Trump falls back on the only organizing principle he has, which is attacking Obama — and usually lying about it,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser to Mr. Obama. “I wouldn’t read anything more into it than that.”
“I have a lot of respect for Justice Roberts, but he didn’t like it,” Mr. Trump said. “But he did say come back — essentially he said come back.” Since 2011, when he explored running for president against Mr. Obama, Mr. Trump has had a singular obsession with the 44th president.
After the Supreme Court ruling, administration lawyers said they planned to drop the issue and would print the census questionnaires without asking about citizenship. But Mr. Trump was infuriated by that decision, and he wrote on Twitter that his administration would find a way forward. He repeatedly questioned Mr. Obama’s citizenship as part of the false “birther” conspiracy. As president, Mr. Obama struck back at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in 2011, when he roasted the reality television star as a lightweight while Mr. Trump sat grim-faced.
It was not clear why there was a disconnect between what the president wanted and why lawyers at the Justice and Commerce Departments had decided to drop the issue. Officials said that Mr. Trump was briefed on the matter, but he was not warned of the political implications of giving up. He later became upset at the appearance that the administration wasn’t fighting harder on an issue that he believed all voters — and not only his core base of supporters — would be interested in. Since then, Mr. Trump has been determined to minimize or unravel Mr. Obama’s accomplishments, and lately has even suggested that his predecessor was behind a deep-state conspiracy with law enforcement and intelligence agencies to thwart his 2016 candidacy.
Mr. Trump offered some support for Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, who is responsible for the census, calling him a “good man.” Mr. Trump also said he had spoken to Attorney General William P. Barr about his options. “We have a number of avenues, we could use” all or one of them, Mr. Trump said. While other presidents have blamed their predecessors for various national ills — including Mr. Obama, who in his first term regularly pointed to former President George W. Bush — Mr. Trump takes it further than most.
Mr. Trump did not say what his options were. But people familiar with the discussions said that among the things being considered is using federal records other than the census questionnaires sent to every household to try to glean information about undocumented immigrants. It is less common for presidents to take on predecessors who are more popular than they are; Mr. Obama was viewed favorably by 63 percent of those surveyed by Gallup last year, while Mr. Trump’s job approval rating is 41 percent.
A federal judge in Maryland, where one of three lawsuits related to the citizenship question is being heard, has given the administration until 2 p.m. Friday to explain how it would proceed. An emergency hearing was called by phone on Wednesday after Mr. Trump tweeted that the administration was looking for a path forward. But Mr. Trump recognizes that his political base wanted, and still wants, someone who would be seen as fighting against Mr. Obama. Especially as Mr. Biden stumps the country on his record in the Obama administration, Mr. Trump sees a political advantage in taking down his predecessor and trying to lift himself as an outsider taking on a system he has led for over two years.
Among the possible options is an executive order, but it was not clear what form it would take or what it would accomplish in light of last month’s Supreme Court’s decision, which rejected the explanation that Mr. Ross had given for adding the citizenship question. Mr. Ross had said he wanted to help the Justice Department gather information to help enforce the Voting Rights Act. “Tell Biden that NATO has taken total advantage of him and President Obama,” Mr. Trump said on Friday. “Biden didn’t know what the hell he was doing and neither did President Obama. NATO was taking advantage of — now they’re paying.”
That justification, Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority, “seems to have been contrived.” But the chief justice left open the possibility that Mr. Ross could offer a genuine and permissible justification following the usual requirements of administrative law, which are complicated and time-consuming. “President Obama and Vice President Biden,” he added, “they didn’t have a clue. They got taken advantage of by China, by NATO, by every country they did business with.”
An executive order from the president could be an attempt to speed the process to allow expedited court review of a new justification. Or it could be an attempt to assert that no justification is needed beyond executive authority. By Mr. Trump’s indictment, Mr. Obama was too soft on China’s trade abuses and too easy on NATO allies who were not spending enough on their own defense, two issues that the current president has pressed much more vigorously. Mr. Trump in recent days has also blamed Mr. Obama for a dispute with Turkey, a NATO ally, over its purchase of S-400 missile systems from Russia.
But the Constitution assigns the responsibility for overseeing a decennial census to Congress, not the president. And Congress has limited executive authority over the census, as the Supreme Court recognized. In leveling his criticisms at Mr. Obama, however, Mr. Trump routinely stretches the facts. As he has repeatedly, Mr. Trump insisted on Friday that had Mr. Obama remained in office, he would have gone to war with North Korea, a claim dismissed as ludicrous by the former president’s advisers.
“The taking of the census is not one of those areas traditionally committed to agency discretion,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote, meaning that it cannot be accomplished by unilateral executive action. In recent days, Mr. Trump has added a new claim — that Mr. Obama tried to meet with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un, only to be rebuffed, an assertion for which he offered no evidence.
One of Mr. Trump’s answers on the census was particularly intriguing. Asked by a reporter why a citizenship question is needed, he said, “You need it for Congress for districting, you need it for appropriations, where are the funds going, how many people are there, are they citizens or not citizens? You need it for many reasons.” “He called Kim Jong-un on numerous occasions to meet. President Obama wanted to meet with Kim Jong-un. And Kim Jong-un said no,” Mr. Trump said on Friday. “Numerous occasions he called. And right now we have a very nice relationship.”
In fact, congressional districts are drawn not on the number of citizens but on the total population. What was not clear was whether Mr. Trump misspoke because he did not know that or if he would favor a change in the way districts are drawn. After Mr. Trump floated this while in Asia last weekend, Mr. Obama’s final national security adviser, Susan E. Rice, used an expletive to deny it. “At the risk of stating the obvious, this is horse-sh*t,” she wrote on Twitter, asterisk and all.
The Supreme Court ruled as recently as 2016 upholding total population as the basis for drawing districts but did not rule on whether other counting methods would be constitutional. Mr. Rhodes, her deputy, repeated the denial on Friday. “There is zero truth to the claim about wanting to meet Kim,” he said. “It’s completely made up and totally incoherent with his previous claim that Obama wanted to go to war with North Korea.”
Other former Obama-era officials have publicly disputed the notion as well, including James R. Clapper Jr., who was director of national intelligence; Wendy R. Sherman, who was under secretary of state; Daniel R. Russel, who was assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs; and Jeremy Bash, who was chief of staff at the C.I.A. and later the Pentagon.
Mr. Trump has also sought to rewrite the history of his own family separation policy at the border, telling audiences that it was Mr. Obama who started it and the current president who stopped it.
“President Obama built those cells. They were in 2014,” Mr. Trump said last weekend at a news conference in Osaka, Japan. He added, “I just say this: They had a separation policy. Right? I ended it.”
He was correct that the Obama administration built some of the detention facilities that have been at the center of the latest furor over the treatment of migrants detained at the border, but they were never meant for the long-term detention of children.
Moreover, while the Obama administration did break up families, it was relatively rare and typically in cases of doubt about the relationship between a child and an accompanying adult.
Mr. Trump’s administration announced a “zero tolerance policy” in April 2018 that resulted in nearly 3,000 children being forcibly separated from parents. After an outcry, Mr. Trump signed an executive order two months later directing officials to end the practice of family separation.