Bay Area’s foggy, festive Fourth
INDEPENDENCE DAY CELEBRATIONS
Fireworks peek through the San Francisco fog Thursday night after America’s 243rd birthday brought out revelers, picnickers and politicians from coast to coast. Crowds hit the Embarcadero early for the chilly July Fourth celebration, huddled in the traditional San Francisco summer outfit — hoodies, jackets and sweatshirts. Even with the haze, the holiday fireworks brought cheers at Pier 39. Parades were held around the Bay Area earlier in the day, including in Alameda, Antioch, Brentwood, Concord, Corte Madera, Cupertino, Danville, Foster City, Fremont, Half Moon Bay, Hercules, Los Altos Hills, Martinez, Menlo Park, Mill Valley, Redwood City, San Jose, Sonoma and Vallejo. Meanwhile, the nation’s official bash was held in Washington, D.C., where President Trump gave a speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial with Army tanks along the National Mall.
WASHINGTON — President Trump said administration officials were working on Independence Day in hopes of finding a way to have the 2020 census include a citizenship question even though the government has begun the process of printing the questionnaire without it.
“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,” Trump said in his first tweet of the holiday.
Trump’s administration has faced numerous roadblocks to adding the question, including last week’s Supreme Court ruling that blocked its inclusion, at least temporarily. The Justice Department had insisted to the Supreme Court that it needed the matter resolved by the end of June because of a deadline to begin printing census forms and other materials.
But on Wednesday, department officials told a federal judge in Maryland they believed there could be a way to meet Trump’s demands.
“There may be a legally available path,” Assistant Attorney General Joseph Hunt told U.S. District Judge George Hazel during a conference call with parties to one of three census lawsuits. The call was closed to reporters; a transcript was made available soon after.
On Tuesday, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a statement that the “Census Bureau has started the process of printing the decennial questionnaires without the question.”
It was a Trump tweet Wednesday — “We are absolutely moving forward” — that sowed enough confusion that Hazel and U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman, overseeing a census lawsuit in New York, demanded clarification.
The Trump administration had said the question was being added to aid in enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, which protects minority voters’ access to the ballot box. But in the Supreme Court’s decision last week, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s four more liberal members in saying the administration’s current justification for the question “seems to have been contrived.”
Opponents of the citizenship question said it would result in inaccurate figures for a count that determines the distribution of some $675 billion in federal spending and how many congressional districts each state gets.