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- Jun 18, 2018
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Step 1: Devise a discriminatory policy. In this case, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, after consulting with Stephen Bannon, who was then President Trump’s nationalist “alt-right” adviser, resolved to put a citizenship question on the 2020 Census for the first time in 70 years. ...Step 2: Create a pretext. In this case, Ross lied to Congress, saying the Justice Department wanted the citizenship question added to help enforce the Voting Rights Act — a claim three lower courts dismissed as pretextual....
Step 3: Muddy the waters. In this case, Solicitor General Noel Francisco and conservative justices raised doubts about the statistical capabilities of the Census Bureau, claiming it couldn’t accurately “quantify” the damage that would be done by adding a citizenship question because the alternative way to get such information was an “untested statistical model.” ...Step 4: Blame the victim. Francisco, the top Trump administration lawyer, saved this nastiness for the final minute of the 80-minute argument. If the court disallows the citizenship question, he said, “you are effectively empowering any group in the country to knock off any question on the census if they simply get together and boycott it,” he said, raising the possibility of a boycott by gender-nonbinary people.
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This is a breathtakingly cynical power grab on the part of the executive and judicial branches. Trump wants to undercount people in blue states because most people don't support him, so they devise a scheme to undercount the census by adding a question about citizenship.
The conservatives on the Supreme Court seem willing to support this by saying that it is needed to uphold the Voting Rights Act, a law whose enforcement provisions they gutted several years ago.
I have come to believe that all of the GOP's efforts to undermine democracy, to the degree that they accept interference from a foreign adversary in our electoral process because they believe that the political power must stay in the hands of white, male, straight, Christians despite their shrinking population and popularity.