houses, you go through all this detail and not allowed to ask whether or not somebody is a citizen so you can ask other things but you can t ask whether or not somebody is a citizen? so we re trying to do that. we re looking at that very strongly. jon: president trump pushing ahead with plans to put a question about citizenship on the 2020 census despite the latest legal setback. let s talk about it with kevin chavis, former president of young democrats ted harvey, thanks both of you for being here. ted, what s the issue that you have with including a question about whether or not you are an american citizen on the u.s. census? well, this is an important issue. i don t have a problem with it. i think the president should ask that question. i think that almost unanimously every american citizen believes we should be asking that simple question. our census is a long list of
very crazy in terms of the census. when did the census become so controversial, constitutionally. the question we have is can the government put on its census, which is required every 10 years as you know by the constitution, can they put a question on there about citizenship? and you wonder why it is so controversial. of course, the reason is there are frankly billions and billions of dollars at stake in terms of government allocations and maybe even more importantly, alicia, is that the congressional seats in every state are allocated based on that census. so you better believe it is very, very important. alicia: but the mission of the census is to count people, not necessarily citizens.
expenses and also cover the hardship suffered by the families of hundreds of passengers killed in those two crashes. alicia: the justice department reversing course says it s trying to find a legal path to including a citizenship question on the 2020 census on orders from president trump. last week the supreme court blocked the question at least tem temporarily. president trump tweeting so important for our country the very simple and basic are you a citizen of the united states question be allowed to be asked in the 2020 census. department of commerce and department of justice are working very hard on this even on the fourth of july. so let s bring in guy lewis, former u.s. attorney who served with attorney general william barr at the d.o.j. at the bush administration. thanks for being here.
bizarre case against the woman who lost her baby. jon: despite a dead end in the courts the trump administration is not giving up on the census question. a look at what options remain for including a question about citizenship. on a john deere x300 series mower. because seasons change but true character doesn t. wow, you ve outdone yourself this time. hey, what re neighbors for? it s beautiful. run with us. search john deere x300 for more.
i want to follow up with a tweet that the president tweeted yesterday and i want to put this up with regard to reports about william barr deciding to print the census reading we re absolutely moving forward as we must because of the importance of the answer to the question. so then you have a judge in maryland, a u.s. district court judge in maryland who then tweeted this. i don t know how many federal judges have twitter accounts but i happen to be one of them and i follow the president and so i saw a tweet that directly contradicted the position. and what he means by this is first you have the supreme court decision and then you had the department of commerce saying okay, we ll go ahead and print the census and the president tweets this and then there is a hurried conference call to figure out what exactly is going on. the administration attorney at the justice department didn t have much of an answer, did he? he did not, it s been the past couple weeks have been