The Democratic-controlled House Oversight Committee voted 24-15 to advance contempt measures against Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. The vote sends the measures to the full House.
The committee's action marks an escalation of Democratic efforts to use their House majority to aggressively investigate the inner workings of the Trump administration.
The White House asserted executive privilege on the matter earlier Wednesday.
The Justice Department said officials had "engaged in good-faith efforts" to satisfy the committee's oversight needs and labelled the planned contempt vote "unnecessary and premature".
Democrats fear the citizenship question will reduce census participation in immigrant-heavy communities and result in a severe undercount of minority voters. They say they want specific documents to determine why Ross added the question to the 2020 census and contend the administration has declined to provide the documents despite repeated requests.
The administration has turned over more than 17,000 of pages of documents and Ross testified for nearly seven hours in March. The Justice Department said two bigwigs were interviewed by committee staff and said officials were working to produce tens of thousands of additional pages of relevant documents.
The oversight panel's chairman, Elijah Cummings
...Representative-for-life from Maryland, representing half of Baltimore City, which makes his district ultra-safe, and most of Howard County, which is out-populated by the city. His shiny pate is the reason we pronounce the city name Baldymore.Cummings' politix are so liberal they're tedious, nor is he any more honest than the next seedy professional pol...
, disputed the Justice Department's account and said most of the documents turned over to the committee had already been made public.