The exciting news

So, no executive order to add the citizenship question.  DOJ attorneys required by the judge to file precise reasons they want to withdraw from the case.  Will the DOJ simply drop the case altogether?

But, more importantly, what does this order do?  Could they not have been given that information without the order?  I think he just likes having his name on official paper.  And saying he got that done where no other president could.

President Trump on Thursday abandoned his quest to place a question about citizenship on the 2020 census, and instructed the government to compile citizenship data from existing federal records instead, ending a bitterly fought legal battle that turned the nonpartisan census into an object of political warfare.

[...]

“We are not backing down on our effort to determine the citizenship status of the United States population,” Mr. Trump said.

  NYT

Of course not. Whoever thought that? Silly Millies.

Even that order appears to merely reiterate plans the Commerce Department announced last year, making it less a new policy than a means of covering Mr. Trump’s retreat from the composition of the 2020 census form.

[...]

Opponents of the citizenship question swiftly condemned Thursday’s announcement, calling Mr. Trump’s position largely a face-saving measure.

“The government already has access to all of this citizenship data through administrative records, and already studies it,” said Vanita Gupta, the former head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division and the chief executive of the Leadership Conference. “Trump just didn’t want to admit defeat.”

FAKE NEWS!

A frustrated-sounding Mr. Trump struck a sharply combative tone at the opening of his remarks, saying that his political opponents were “trying to erase the very existence of a very important word and a very important thing, citizenship.”

“The only people who are not proud to be citizens are the ones who are fighting us all the way about the word ‘citizen,’” he added.

[...]

Mr. Trump made the clearest statement yet that his administration’s ultimate goal in obtaining data on citizenship was to eliminate noncitizens from the population bases used to draw political boundaries — a longstanding dream in some Republican circles.

[...]

“This information is also relevant to administering our elections,” said Mr. Trump. “Some states may want to draw state and local legislative districts, based upon the voter eligible population.”

Precisely what led the courts to block it.

The Census Bureau for decades has relied on data from other agencies to check the accuracy of their head counts. For the purposes of obtaining citizenship data, the Census Bureau could identify American citizens with some precision by mining immigration data from the federal Citizenship and Immigration Services agency, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, and data from programs that require citizenship to participate, such as Social Security numbers and some taxpayer identification numbers. Other citizenship data come from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, which asks a small fraction of the population questions — including on citizenship — every month.

[...]

“It’s all extremely protected by privacy laws,” Ms. Anderson said. “Even if the Census Bureau put together administrative records on citizens and noncitizens on an individual basis” — which would not necessarily be compiled into some sort of central registry — “for that to be given to anybody would require a major new law.”

That'll be his next executive order.

The Census Bureau has said that it intends to provide anonymous data on citizenship to states in 2021, in a data file separate from census results.

So, never mind. EO not needed.

Following Mr. Trump to the Rose Garden podium on Thursday, his attorney general, William P. Barr, said that any administration move to modify the census would have survived legal review, but only after a lengthy process that would have jeopardized the administration’s ability to conduct the census in a timely manner.

Oh, sure. Sure. You COULD have won the case.

“Put simply, the impediment was a logistical impediment, not a legal one,” Mr. Barr said. “We simply cannot complete the litigation in time to carry out the census.”

Especially since the court quite frankly said you lied about your reasoning and wouldn't let your lawyers out of the case so you could put another crew on who hadn't already liedd.

In a statement, a Justice Department spokeswoman said the department would “promptly inform the courts” that the government would not seek to include a citizenship question on the census.

Curses. Foiled again.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.