Trump Wins By Losing on Census Citizenship Question
President Donald Trump has abandoned efforts to include a question on citizenship in the 2020 US census. Instead, he has ordered federal agencies to provide data to the administration on the number of citizens, non-citizens and undocumented immigrants living in the US.
The existence of a pool of data on citizenship is nothing new; follow up surveys from the census bureau, for instance, ask questions relating to citizenship. What is new here is the intent for using the information.
Part of what the Trump administration wanted in the first place was data about citizenship on the 2020 Census to help states seeking to draw citizens-only voting districts in the next round of redistricting. The president’s executive order seeks provide data enabling this scheme.
While the constitution says total population must be used in drawing voting districts for federal elections, the Supreme Court (Evenwel v. Abbott, 2016) has left the door open for states to do things differently.
Such a change would provide a new opportunity for Republican-controlled states - those most likely to adopt citizens-only redistricting - to redraw their voting maps in a way that could help their party win more state-level elections.
Add this new methodology to the current --and now official legal-- gerrymandering processes and you have a perfect storm for keeping America White. Which, after all, is the real intent.
Via Reuters:
Data from the nonpartisan APM Research Lab showed that 95 of the 100 U.S. congressional districts with the highest foreign-born populations are represented by Democrats. Similar data for state-level seats was not available.
Redrawing such districts with citizen-only populations would give Republicans a better shot by expanding the districts into more conservative areas, said Albert Kauffman, a professor at St. Mary’s School of Law in San Antonio who has studied redistricting and opposes excluding non-citizens.
In Texas, a citizens-only map could strip Latino voters of majorities in two or three state senate seats and six or seven state representative seats, Kauffman said, pointing out that Hispanic voters traditionally lean left.
https://twitter.com/rebeccaballhaus/status/1149688050752086017
Still, there are those who describe the presidential flip flop on this issue as a victory of sorts.
Earlier in the day on Thursday there were ominous signs Trump would simply tell the Supreme Court to take a hike and order a citizenship question to be included in the census.
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If feel a rant coming...
The only possible recourse for such defiance would be impeachment. And given the lack of spines in the GOP-controlled Senate, removing the president is a non-starter.
It would be nice to have the House of Representatives to hold impeachment hearings to examine the evidence, but if that were to happen it would probably be sometime during 2025.
President Ivanka would assert executive privilege, and the half dozen or so lawyers left working at the Department of Justice would file reprints of Washington Times op eds instead of briefs to bolster their case.
Ahhhh. Much better now.
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There are additional wins for the Trump administration baked into this process, as this snip from Politico’s California Playbook indicates:
With billions in federal aid and the loss of potential House seats at stake, California officials were prepared to double down on efforts to fight against the threats of an executive action. Although Trump retreated from that move Thursday — his Justice Department admitting defeat — he may already have logged a victory simply by boosting anxieties among millions of immigrants who will be asked to participate, they say.
"The fact that he's making a mockery out of the whole process is disturbing,'' says attorney Leslie Katz, a former San Francisco Supervisor and an expert on government law and policy. "We've traditionally taken it very seriously, and recognized the importance of the census as something that affects funding for everything from public transportation to public health. ... But now, regardless of his gamesmanship, I'm afraid it will scare people from providing accurate information — or from responding at all.''
Jessica Levinson, law professor at Loyola University of Los Angeles, said Trump's insistence on counting immigrants, particularly those who are undocumented, represents a political win with his base. "The longer he can keep this fight alive, the better it is for him politically,'' she says, adding that the issue fires up his voters in advance of the 2020 race.
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The mere threat of a citizenship question in an era where two-thirds of the population lives within 100 miles of the borders of the U.S., and is thus under the jurisdiction of agencies granted extraordinary powers could do the trick.
Being a legal citizen (by birthright or oath of allegiance) offers little protection from the government’s drive to deport, especially if one doesn’t fit the “look” expected by immigration authorities.
Law professors Cassandra Burke Robinson and Irina Manta studied civil litigation involving citizenship disputes and thousands of cases involving citizens caught up in immigration cases. From their report at The Conversation:
In fact, more than 1,500 U.S. citizens spent time in immigration detention between 2007 and 2015 before the government acknowledged the mistake, federal records indicate. Northwestern University political scientist Jacqueline Stevens estimated that approximately 1% of all immigration detainees from more than 8,000 cases between 2006 and 2008 that she studied were U.S. citizens.
Add that fear to the rhetoric of the President and his supporters and it’s entirely rational to assume people will take steps to avoid being counted.
Thanks to the recent discovery of a trove of files from the deceased Republican operative and redistricting expert Thomas Hofeller, we know beyond the shadow of a doubt where this is coming from
Via the New Yorker:
Hofeller, the documents show, conducted a private study in 2015 which concluded that a citizenship question would decrease the political power of Latinos and “be advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites” in the redistricting process; he also wrote that employing citizenship data derived from the census “can be expected to provoke a high degree of resistance from Democrats and the major minority groups in the nation.”
Hofeller later urged the Trump Administration to adopt a citizenship question and helped craft its public legal argument that the Census Bureau needed citizenship data to better enforce the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Now, let’s put this info next to an excerpt from a Washington Post article about the president’s idea for reforming imigration laws standards:
All told, the proposal could cut off entry for more than 20 million legal immigrants over the next four decades. The change could have profound effects on the size of the U.S. population and its composition, altering projections for economic growth and the age of the nation's workforce, as well as shaping its politics and culture, demographers and immigration experts say.
“By greatly slashing the number of Hispanic and black African immigrants entering America, this proposal would reshape the future United States. Decades ahead, many fewer of us would be nonwhite or have nonwhite people in our families,” said Michael Clemens, an economist at the Center for Global Development, a think tank that has been critical of the proposal. “Selectively blocking immigrant groups changes who America is. This is the biggest attempt in a century to do that.”
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It’s important to remember when looking at the uproar over the census that this event is part of a larger pattern of behavior. The forces that put Trump in office may not like his tweeting on occasion, but they’re thrilled about undoing our social compact.
And the erosion is relentless, whether it be voting rights, civil rights, Health care, consumer protections, environmental law, worker protections, or simply having a real opportunity to make a better future if you’re not already wealthy.
Remember, Trump is a symptom, not the illness.
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PS - I forgot to mention reworking the Bill of Rights, Second Amendment excepted, of course.
https://twitter.com/politico/status/1149381611265429504
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