Court loss doesn't stop the elections push: officials unveil plan to rig 2030 census same week.

…(cont) The Times ran a story dated the fifteenth — hold on, let me find the line I wrote down — here: "President Trump has launched a broad, governmentwide effort to take more control of state-run elections and sow doubt about the outcome." I read that one twice standing in the driveway, because the car wouldn't turn over and I had nothing else to do but wait for the neighbor with the jumper cables.

"Governmentwide effort" is a big phrase for a Tuesday paper, so I went looking for what it meant on paper — not what they said they were doing, but what they'd actually filed.

Six days before that story ran — the ninth of September, I've got it right here — the administration put out a proposal changing how the 2030 census counts a person. Not who counts. How. The new rule says a person's "usual residence" is wherever they legally spend the most days. Not where they live. Where they're there the most. I had to read that three times, and I still don't know that I've got it — maybe the fella at the corner store could explain it, since he knows who actually lives on this block better than any form I've ever filled out.

Is that the same administration the Times says is trying to assert control over elections — the one whose effort "continues, despite court loss"? I only ask because the dates are sitting funny with me. Do you lose a case about how a count gets taken, and then, the same week, file a new proposal about how the next one does?

I don't know how much weight sits in a Federal Register notice. I can barely get the DMV to spell my name right when I renew the registration on that car with the fan belt that never makes it through a full winter. But I know what the proposal itself says it could do, because I copied it word for word: it could "exclude millions of people from the population count, alter congressional representation in favor of Republicans, and shift the distribution of federal resources among states." That's not my sentence. That's theirs, filed in the Federal Register, on the record.

So here's what I keep circling, and I apologize for coming back around on it — when a court closes a case, does whatever was behind it stop, or does it just go looking for the next form to file?

One last thing before you go, because I almost let it get past me. The court story ran on the fifteenth. The census proposal ran on the ninth. Different days — but the same week. And the public only gets to say anything about the second one for how long, exactly? I checked again this morning, sitting in the driveway waiting for the car to warm up: thirty days.