Trump team works overtime to add citizenship question to census

President Trump said Thursday he’s told the Justice and Commerce departments to work through the federal Independence Day holiday to try to find a way to shoehorn the citizenship question back into the 2020 census.

Department lawyers are racing a Friday deadline for telling the courts what they plan to do after a crazy couple of days of Trump-inspired reversals.

“So important for our Country that the very simple and basic ‘Are you a Citizen of the United States?’ question be allowed to be asked in the 2020 Census,” the president said on Twitter.

He added: “Department of Commerce and the Department of Justice are working very hard on this, even on the 4th of July!”

It was Mr. Trump’s Twitter account that upended the situation on Wednesday, a day after the lawyers had told federal district courts that the question had been dropped.

The president insisted that was “fake,” sending the government lawyers scrambling to explain to judges what was going on.

One Justice Department lawyer told a judge in Maryland that he didn’t think anything had changed, and the Census Bureau was still printing the 2020 questionnaire sans the citizenship question.

Another department lawyer, though, said they were still exploring Mr. Trump’s deep desire to ask the question.

The Supreme Court last week ruled that while a citizenship question is legal and has been asked before, this administration bungled the effort to add it back in for next year’s count.