WASHINGTON -- The House Oversight Committee sued two top Trump administration officials Tuesday for refusing to produce documents related to a decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.
Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross "have not produced a single additional document" since the Supreme Court blocked the administration's efforts to include the citizenship question in June, the committee said.
Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., who was elected oversight chairman last week, said the lawsuit follows the example set by the panel's late chairman, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland.
Cummings, who died in October, "believed with all his heart that the Constitution requires Congress to ensure that the rapidly approaching census is conducted in a professional manner that promotes accuracy, ensures integrity and is free from partisan politics -- and I couldn't agree more," Maloney said.
"President [Donald] Trump and his aides are not above the law. They cannot be allowed to disregard and degrade the authority of Congress to fulfill our core constitutional legislative and oversight responsibilities," she said.
The lawsuit marks the latest action by Democrats to use their House majority to investigate the inner workings of the Trump administration, including a House vote in July to hold Barr and Ross in contempt of Congress over the census issue.
The Oversight Committee also is one the House committees leading an impeachment inquiry of Trump.
Trump abandoned the citizenship question over the summer after the Supreme Court said the administration's justification for the question "seems to have been contrived." Trump directed agencies to try to compile the information using existing databases.
A Commerce Department spokeswoman said the lawsuit lacks merit and said the Commerce Department has cooperated in good faith with the Oversight Committee.
The department has made over 2,000 documents available to the committee since January and submitted hundreds of pages of additional documents since the Supreme Court's decision, the spokeswoman said. Current and former officials participated in transcribed interviews, and Ross testified before the panel for seven hours, she said.
Maloney said the committee continued its investigation in recent months, even as Cummings' health declined, and has obtained new documents and information from other sources.
Lawmakers need the documents being withheld by the Justice and Commerce departments, in part, to determine whether Congress should take emergency action to protect the census from partisan political interference, she said.
Democrats believe that the documents will show that the administration's stated rationale for collecting the data -- to better enforce the Voting Rights Act -- was a cover story invented to mask a politically motivated attempt to diminish Democratic power by discouraging noncitizens from completing the survey. States rely on raw population data, rather than eligible voters, to draw House districts and to determine access to federal social welfare programs.
The panel is seeking unredacted documents concerning developments in the process of adding the citizenship question and communications between the Commerce Department and the Justice Department. The documents "go to the heart of the committee's investigative interests," Maloney previously told lawmakers on the panel.
House Democrats have been successful so far in eliciting testimony and documents from Census Bureau officials as well as a member of Trump's transition team, both in their own inquiry and through the Supreme Court case.
That evidence showed that adding a citizenship question was pitched to the Trump campaign and was discussed by White House officials in early 2017. Ross sought to add a citizenship question before the Justice Department request, and personally sought its assistance in September 2017.
Christa Jones, the Census Bureau's chief of staff, additionally told House investigators that she had been in touch with a Republican redistricting strategist to discuss the effort to add the question, and that he had expressed interest in using the question for what he called "the Republican redistricting effort."
Jones testified to investigators that she told the strategist, Thomas Hofeller, that adding a citizenship question would "have a negative impact" on the response rate to the census.
In a related development, a liberal advocacy group also filed suit Tuesday, claiming the Census Bureau has "drastically and arbitrarily" underfunded the 2020 census, jeopardizing accurate counts of black Americans, Hispanics and other minority groups.
The suit, filed by the nonprofit Center for Popular Democracy, says that the Census Bureau has refused to spend more than $1 billion in appropriated funds, despite a congressional directive to spend the money to avoid an undercount.
The New York group champions worker and immigrant rights.
The census is set to begin in Alaska in January and across the country in April.
Information for this article was contributed by Matthew Daly of The Associated Press; and by Catie Edmondson of The New York Times.
A Section on 11/27/2019