Hansi Lo Wang for NPR:

The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to allow counting for the 2020 census to end soon.

In an emergency request on Wednesday, Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall said that the Census Bureau must immediately wrap up its field operations, now that it’s passed the bureau’s internal target date of Oct. 5, in order to have a chance of meeting the legal deadline for delivering the first set of census results to President Trump by year’s end.

“With October 5 having come and gone while the court of appeals was considering the stay application,” Wall wrote, “every passing day exacerbates the serious risk that the district court’s order to continue field operations and delay post processing will make it impossible for the Bureau to comply with the December 31 statutory reporting deadline.”

See also this tweet thread by Marty Lederman, which includes this nugget: