July 11, 2019

Donald Trump, the King of The Cave, has caved on his biggest fight ever - the census question. After losing in the Supreme Court last month and then trying to throw a Hail Mary by switching DOJ attorneys at the last minute (which failed), Trump just packed up his bag and gave up.

CNN discussed Trump's epic cave:

GLORIA BORGER: Well, he effectively said "if we had challenged, we would have won Of course, we would have won, because the Supreme Court didn't say that we couldn't challenge it, but there was not enough time and as a result, and there was a little bit of the Dear Leader in what the Attorney General was saying, and the way he said "Congratulations, Mr. President" for doing the right thing, and this is what the Commerce Department suggested in January of 2018. So they have gone through all of this chaos to get back to what is suggested to them well over a year ago and I think that this is such a political speech from the Rose Garden, and it is the President saying that the Democrats are determined to conceal the number of illegal aliens in the midst, and we will leave no stone unturned and so he has two enemies - the Democrats and the illegal immigrants.

And then the Attorney General blamed the Commerce Department for the problem because they did not do a good job of explaining it.

BILTZER: With Wilbur Ross ,the Commerce Secretary, right there not uttering a word standing right next to the President.

GUEST 2: It is nonsense from the moment that Trump started speaking to moment that Bill Barr started speaking, and the United States government standing up to admitting that their litigating positions, and the representation to the elsewhere and put on the citizenship question, and one phrase that we did not hear in that entire speech is the Voting Rights Act, and they claimed they were invoking this because of the Voting Rights Act, and this is utter capitulation of trying to move the goalpost of the entire framing of whether the question here was whether or not they were entitled to count the citizens. No one ever said that the United States government was not allowed the count the number of citizens, but the question is whether you could use the census to ask this and so once again this is Trump standing up and essentially lying or giving a fantasy view of what is happening saying "this is the real fight" and then declaring a victory. It is pretty astonishing to see.

The best part of this dramatic Rose Garden ceremony was when Trump declared that he was signing an Executive Order ordering federal agencies to hand over data they already have regarding citizenship. This is probably as simple as doing a database query and running some spreadsheets or exporting some data sets. No EO needed, just a simple request to the heads of the agencies.

King of Caves, thy name is Trump.

Ed. Note: Ilyse Hogue nails it.

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