BREAKING: Judge Furman blocks the citizenship question to the #2020Census on the grounds that it violated the Administrative Procedure Act.

"The Court’s Opinion is, to put it mildly, long."

No kidding. It runs 277 pages.

Tl;dr: "Secretary Ross violated the public trust."

Story coming, and I'll make the ruling available as soon as it's uploaded. Here's an important passage of it.

"To conclude otherwise and let Secretary Ross’s decision stand would undermine the proposition — central to the rule of law — that ours is a 'government of laws, and not of men.” John Adams, Novanglus Papers, No. 7 (1775)."

#2020Census ruling here: documentcloud.org/documents/5684…

The NYCLU's @JustAskDonna celebrates the ruling as a check on the "anti-immigrant overreach of the Trump administration."

"New Yorkers know that we all deserve representation and that no one should be intimidated from being counted.”

Statement by @NewYorkStateAG Letitia James, whose predecessor Barbara Underwood led 18 states in the lawsuit.

"Inciting fear in our residents is not only immoral, but also ill-conceived."

To be clear, Judge Furman stopped short of an equal protection violation, but he said SCOTUS may have been to blame for that by blocking Wilbur Ross's deposition, which could have revealed discriminatory intent.

The Census Bureau has not yet responded to my request for comment, and its voicemail has an away message stating that the line is unstaffed because of the government shutdown.

My developing story. Much more to come: courthousenews.com/citizenship-qu…

The @NAACP, which also has a pending census case in Maryland, put out this statement.

Background: courthousenews.com/predicting-cen…

It is now a judicial finding that the Census Bureau's top scientist "choked up and visibly held back tears" on the witness stand when asked whether his work mattered because of Wilbur Ross's political interference in the #2020Census.

While I'd always thought this quote traced back to Rainer Maria Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet," Judge Furman is right, and I am mistaken. It's French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal. quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/sho…

For those calling the decision political, try trudging through the 88 footnotes in the 277-page mixed ruling, and see if they read like a partisan treatise. This one notes that five out of six former Census Bureau directors oppose the question; the other testified for plaintiffs.

Another notes as an afterthought that the Census Bureau estimates that adding a citizenship question will cost taxpayers at least $82.5 million and lower response rates among noncitizen households by at least 5.8%.

Pricey question. How many furloughed workers would that pay?