A Federal Judge has denied the Justice Department request to change their legal team regarding the Census lawsuit:
BLOOMBERG – A federal judge rejected a request by the Trump administration to assign a new legal team to a lawsuit that blocked the U.S. from adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census.
U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman in Manhattan called the government’s request “patently deficient,” adding that the U.S. had provided “no reasons, let alone ’satisfactory reasons,’ for the substitution of counsel.”
Government officials have been searching for a way to insert the citizenship question on the census following a Supreme Court ruling that put the administration’s plan on hold because its rationale for the query was “contrived.” The forms for the once-a-decade headcount must be prepared soon to meet the deadline for 2020.
The Trump administration hasn’t detailed why it sought to replace the U.S. lawyers handling the lawsuit. The Washington Post, citing a person familiar with the matter, said that some of the original lawyers on the case had concerns about the way the government was handling it.
The Justice Department’s “mere expectation that withdrawal of current counsel will not cause any disruption is not good enough,” Furman wrote in an order on Tuesday.
If it’s not one thing it’s another. It’s seems it’s almost every day we hear of a court denying one thing or another with respect to requests made by the Trump administration.
And in this case it’s one again an Obama judge. I don’t know how much this pertains to the specific denial, but some believe it’s all about being anti-Trump:
Trump-hating judges now trying to prevent Trump from picking his own legal team. https://t.co/dHorsUtz72
— Robert Barnes (@Barnes_Law) July 9, 2019