Noah Feldman, Columnist

Good Luck to Trump’s New Census Lawyers. They’re Going to Need It.

To continue the fight, the Justice Department will have to stand up in court and say it was previously wrong about some aspect of the citizenship question.

July 8, 2019 at 6:47 PM UTC

By Noah Feldman

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

Same case, new lawyers.
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

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We don’t know whether the Department of Justice lawyers working on the census case were fired en masse or quit. Either way, Sunday’s announcement was a genuinely shocking development in President Donald Trump’s efforts to add a citizenship question to the 2020 count. It’s bizarre to the point of being unprecedented for the government to change horses like this in the middle of such a highly time-sensitive legal process.

The move signals that the Trump administration is very likely on the way to making some doubtful legal claims — claims that will have to be in stark contradiction to what the Department of Justice has already said to the federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, in a lawsuit brought by civil-rights groups trying to scrap the question.