Comment Previously unreleased internal memos show the Trump administration sought to add a citizenship question to the census aimed at swaying congressional apportionment, according to a report released Wednesday by the House Oversight and Reform Committee. The documents appear to contradict statements by then-Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who told the committee that the push for a citizenship question was unrelated to allocation and the reason for adding it was to help enforce the U.S. voting rights. The nearly 500 documents include several drafts of an August 2017 memo written by a lawyer and Commerce Department political appointee, James Uthmeier, in which he initially warned that using a citizenship question for apportionment would likely be illegal and violate the constitution, the report said . In later drafts, Uthmeier and another political appointee, Earl Comstock, revised the draft to say there was “nothing illegal or unconstitutional about the addition of a citizenship question” and asserted that the Founders “intended that the apportionment count be based on legal residents”. the report said. In December 2017, the Justice Department sent a formal request to the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, asking it to add the question; in March 2018, Ross announced it would be added to the 2020 Census. “Today’s committee memo pulls back the curtain on this disgraceful behavior and clearly shows how the Trump administration secretly sought to manipulate the census for political gain while lying to the public and Congress about their goals,” said the Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn B. Maloney (DN. Y.) said in a statement. The administration’s effort to add the question took two years. It was challenged by civil rights groups who blasted it as an attempt to denigrate Latinos and scare immigrant communities from participating in a survey that determines congressional reapportionment and redistricting, as well as the disbursement of $1.5 trillion in federal funds. annually. The new evidence echoes documents surfaced during the litigation over the issue, including a study by a Republican operative that found adding a citizenship question would benefit Republicans in redistricting. “It was obvious it was just a hoax,” said former Census Bureau Director John Thompson, who testified at the time, saying the bureau under Ross had not properly vetted the citizenship question before adding it. “I’m glad the committee got the materials to back that up, but it wasn’t surprising.” Thomas Wolff, associate director of the Democracy Program at NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, said: “Less than doubt that what the Trump administration did was wrong, these documents show that even the Trump administration itself knew that what it did did was illegal. .” The Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that the administration’s rationale for adding the question was “contrived,” and the administration abandoned the effort. He then said he would block undocumented immigrants from being counted for the allocation, sparking another court battle that has dragged on into the final days of Donald Trump’s presidency. That effort ultimately failed when, due to pandemic-related delays, the Census Bureau was unable to deliver state population totals to the president before he left office. The administration was also unable to explain how it planned to identify and count undocumented immigrants, for whom there is no official count. Census data shows widening diversity. The number of Whites is declining for the first time Documents obtained by the committee had been withheld by the Trump administration despite subpoenas, the report said, adding that the committee faced “unprecedented obstruction” from administration officials. Ross and then-Attorney General William P. Barr were held in contempt of Congress after refusing to produce them, the report noted, adding that the previously withheld or redacted documents were finally released “after more than two years of litigation and the arrival of a new administration”. Maloney introduced a bill last week that she said is designed to protect the Census Bureau from future attempts to politicize it. HR 8326, the Fair and Accurate Census Act, would prevent the removal of a Census Bureau director without cause, limit the number of political appointees to the office and bar the Commerce Secretary from adding topics or questions to the investigation “unless he has followed existing statutory requirements to notify Congress in advance.” The I will Also, new questions are prohibited from appearing on the decennial census form unless they have been “researched, tested, certified by the Secretary, and evaluated by the Government Accountability Office.” Thompson praised the bill. “I think it would protect the independence of the Census Bureau,” he said. “I’m very excited about the bill. … I hope it will be implemented.” But even if it is, it may not completely insulate the office from partisan interference, he said. Under the Republican House and Senate, “Congress could direct the Census Bureau to obtain citizenship [information] on the census and then there could be a scramble to put citizenship in the 2030 Census,” he said, adding, “Congress could try to pass a law that says you have to apportion by citizenship ». The bar for passing a constitutional amendment will be high, Wolf said. But the Trump administration’s attempt to add the citizenship question and exclude undocumented people from the apportionment “shows that the 2020 Census was in serious jeopardy, and we only escaped through a combination of significant legal victories and a certain amount of luck,” he said. . “The inventory is clearly too fragile to continue in its endangered state.” Along with limiting political appointees and giving the Census Bureau director additional powers, as Maloney’s bill proposes, Wolf proposed limiting the president’s ability to affect apportionment, as Trump has proposed doing. By law, redistricting of the 435 House seats is supposed to happen automatically based on state population totals. “The president’s role in the apportionment process was supposed to be administrative,” Wolf said. “That’s why it’s called automatic allocation.”
