Trump, 'not backing down' in effort to count citizens amid census fight, announces executive order
What this means is that the citizenship question isn't going to be on the 2020 Census, because the Supreme Court completely
screwed that with their ruling, so fair enough. Everyone could sit around and scream about how unfair it was or how dumb the ruling was, but that doesn't change the outcome either way. With this executive order, that doesn't really matter now.
Every department and agency in the federal government will need to provide the Department of Commerce with all requested records regarding the number of citizens and non-citizens in the country, and then the Census Bureau can use this information--along with information collected through the questionnaire--to create the official census. This basically means that the
functionality of the question is going to be a part of the census whether they like it or not, it won't even need to be a
part of the actual questionnaire to do it, and it will actually be
more accurate for it, since it's very easy to just lie or fail to hand in the census.
So, the real question is, if they could always do it this way, why not do it before?