Well, that's proceeding swimmingly. Thanks, "Squad"!Rep. Lacy Clay just unloaded on @AOC , her chief of staff and Justice Democrats in the Speaker's Lobby, calls them "juvenile," says "their ignorance is beyond belief": "You’re getting push back so you resort to using the race card? Unbelievable."— Jonathan Easley (@JonEasley) July 11, 2019
And yeah, Trump said even less than I expected him to say. He folded like a cheap suit.
Trump gives up on adding citizenship question to the census after Supreme Court ruling, vows to collect the data already available in government files.— Peter Baker (@peterbakernyt) July 11, 2019
So "winner" takes nothing. He won't even point to "adding" the question to the ACS; it's just "Game over, man! Game over!" Barr disseminated:
Barr: A citizenship question could be done on the 2020 Census, but says the legal fight would take too long to win.1— Samantha-Jo Roth (@SamanthaJoRoth) July 11, 2019
"We coulda! We coulda! We just didn't want to!" What about all that noise Trump made about fixing it himself? Fake news!
Barr is saying adding a question on citizenship by “executive fiat” was never under consideration. The president said it was, multiple times.— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) July 11, 2019
And since Secretary of Commerce Ross wasn't there:
Barr, without naming Ross, put this squarely on Ross. In most - but not all - conversations in last two weeks, Trump has been livid about Ross, whose history with Trump is long enough that he is likely safe in his job.— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) July 11, 2019
“But while the Supreme Court correctly recognized that it would be entirely appropriate to include citizenship questions on the census, it nevertheless held that the Commerce Department did not quality explain its decisions for doing so on the 2020 census,” Barr said with Ross standing next to him. “Because, as the Supreme Court recognized, the defect in the commerce department’s decision was curable with a better record, the president asked me to work with Secretary Ross to determine whether there remained a viable path for including a citizenship question on the census. I did so.”
The judges in New York and Maryland were not immediately available for comment.
But in the same remarks he and Attorney General Bill Barr made clear that they were doubling down on a central goal of putting the question on the census: to erase immigrant communities from the count to determine political power in the United States.
Trump is ordering the Commerce Department to collect citizenship data from other government agencies, and his administration intends to use that data to try to reshape the structure of American democracy in away that will boost Republicans to the detriment of Democratic-leaning immigrant communities.
Trump said specifically that the data will be useful for states that want to draw legislative districts based on a citizen-based metric, rather than total population, as is nearly universally done now.
That means in red states like Texas, where the immigration population is growing, Republican lawmakers will be able to decrease the number of representatives those communities — many of them urban and Democratic-leaning — get, while increasing seats given to the white and more rural parts of the states.
In announcing the move, Trump essentially confirmed what was long believed to be a key endgame of the census citizenship question.
Of course, that's going to lead to more than a few court challenges, since the census data is what the Constitution contemplates being used to apportion representation for the House of Representatives, and nothing in the Constitution says apportionment is limited to citizens (this is why slaves were 3/5's of a person until that portion of the Constitution was repealed).
What Trump is going to do is screw up redistricting for much of the next decade. And honestly, the way Texas is going politically and demographically, I don't think even the Republicans want to poke that hornet's nest. They'd piss off a lot of voters and lose in court, to boot.
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