“Judge rebukes Trump officials over bid to stop census trial”

Bloomberg:

A federal judge in New York chastised the Justice Department for seeking an emergency halt to a trial over the Trump administration’s plan to add a question about citizenship to the 2020 census, saying its efforts were “puzzling, if not sanctionable.”

U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman, who heard testimony in the case in Manhattan earlier this month, rejected the government’s latest bid to derail the case, noting it was one of a dozen such requests. Furman said the government’s claims that it would suffer harm unless he put the case on hold “makes so little sense, even on its own terms, that it is hard to understand as anything but an attempt to avoid a timely decision on the merits altogether.”

Referring to a “sanctionable line,” Furman said the Justice Department’s filing “would sure seem to cross it.” He said the government’s repeated requests about the case before him, made to different courts, have shown an “extraordinary lack of respect” for judicial norms.

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