The Oversight and Reform Commission report, the culmination of a years-long investigation, detailed new findings based on draft internal memos and secret email communications between political appointees at the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, and Justice Department counterparts. The documents provided the most definitive evidence yet that the Trump administration aimed to exclude noncitizens from the count to sway congressional apportionment that would benefit the Republican Party, the report concluded, and that senior officials used a false pretense to to make a legal case to ask all residents of the United States whether they were American citizens. Former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross had testified to Congress that the administration decided to add the question because it required more accurate data on citizenship to enforce the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But the Supreme Court in June 2019 ruled that logic “seems to be contrived,” and a week later the Trump administration abandoned its effort to ask about citizenship in the 2020 census. However, a protracted dispute between the House committee and former President Donald J. Trump to release a trove of documents that could shed light on the matter stretched to the end of his term. After Mr. Trump left, the committee struck a deal with the Commerce and Justice departments to obtain the documents they had previously withheld. “For years, the Trump administration has delayed and obstructed the oversight committee’s investigation into the real reason for adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census, even after the Supreme Court ruled that the administration’s efforts were illegal,” said spokeswoman Carolyn B .Maloney of New York. , chairman of the committee. “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,” he said. “Executive branch officials discussing important issues before making policy is evidence of good governance,” department spokesman Kevin Manning said at the time.
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The committee was expected Wednesday to mark up a bill to strengthen the Census Bureau’s institutional independence to prevent political interference in the agency. Wednesday’s report cites several drafts of an August 2017 memo on the citizenship question prepared by James Uthmeier, a political appointee and attorney at the Commerce Department, showing him initially expressing skepticism and eventually strong support for including the question. “More than two hundred years of precedent, along with substantially persuasive historical and textual arguments suggest that citizenship data probably cannot be used for the purpose of apportioning representatives,” Mr. Uthmeier said in an early note. In later drafts, Mr. Uthmeier and another political appointee, Earl Comstock, changed or removed language that said adding a citizenship question was likely to be illegal and unconstitutional, investigators found. “Ultimately, we do not make decisions about how the data will be used for allocation, meaning Congress (or possibly the president) will decide,” Mr. Uthmeier said in a later email to Mr. Comstock, which revised a memo . attached. “I think that’s our hook here,” he wrote. Officials also added language to emphasize the commerce secretary’s discretion to add the citizenship question. The final memo reached the opposite conclusion of the original draft, asserting that “there is nothing illegal or unconstitutional about adding a citizenship question” and asserting: “There are grounds for legal argument on which the founders intended the count of legal residents to be based.” A handwritten memo from Mr. Uthmeier to John Gore, a political appointee at the Justice Department, showed that the political appointees had directed the Justice Department to ask the Commerce Department to add the citizenship question, the report said. The Justice Department eventually sent a formal request in December 2017 to the Commerce Department asking for the “critical” information from the households. Mr. Ross later said that by adding the question to the 2020 census, the agency was fulfilling that request. Every 10 years, the federal government takes a census to count all the people in the country. Everyone counts without exception, whether they are adults or children, citizens or non-citizens. The count is used to allocate funds to federal programs. It also has a major impact on the nation’s politics because it is used to apportion representation in Congress, the Electoral College, and state legislatures. Adding the citizenship question would mean asking every member of every household in the country about their citizenship status. About 22 million people live in the United States who are not citizens but are in the country legally. Among them are green card holders, professionals on work visas and foreign students. About 11 million are undocumented. Experts predicted that the citizenship question would have intimidated immigrants — legal and undocumented — into avoiding the census, resulting in an undercount of several million that would likely undermine Democrats by shifting political power from diverse urban to rural areas. Evidence filed in lawsuits challenging the addition of the citizenship question suggests that partisan gain was at least one factor, and likely its primary goal. The new findings seem to confirm that this is what happened. In Supreme Court arguments in April 2019 on the legality of including the question, the Trump administration argued that the benefits of obtaining more accurate citizenship data outweighed any harm stemming from the potential depressing response to the census. And he rejected accusations that the Commerce Department had concocted a justification for adding the question to the census. During its investigation, the House committee found that as early as 2015, members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle, including Steve Bannon, began discussing the possibility of adding a citizenship question to the census. And it was later revealed that Thomas B. Hofeller, a political strategist and gerrymandering expert who died in 2018, had played a role in the decision to add the question. Mr. Ross, a billionaire businessman appointed by Mr. Trump to head the Commerce Department, led the effort. Announcing his decision to add the question in March 2018, he presented it as based on months of research by the Census Bureau and advice from members of Congress, businesses and groups with a stake in accurate measurement. The commission’s report said the documents portrayed it very differently. “The documents released today demonstrate the depths to which political actors have sought to corrupt a key function enumerated in the Constitution: the census of all people in America every 10 years,” said John C. Yang, executive director of the Asian Justice Center. America. a civil rights organization that was among the litigants on the citizenship issue. “Secretary Ross has chosen to pursue his policy goals by any means available,” Mr. Young said. The Fair and Accurate Census Assurance Act, authored by Ms. Maloney, would seek to insulate the agency from political pressure by limiting to three the number of political appointees allowed at the Census Bureau, including the agency’s director. Only the director could make operational, statistical or technical decisions on counting decades, according to the bill, and only one person could be appointed as a deputy by the director, and that person must be a career civil servant. Terri Ann Rosenthal, census counsel for civil rights groups, said the legislation is vital to protecting the agency and restoring public confidence in its integrity. “There is nothing more critical to a democratic system of government than objective, reliable statistics,” he said. “Political interference undermines the office’s ability to carry out this mission. Our democracy rests on a census at its core.”
