A new cache of documents obtained by Congress confirmed that the Trump administration pushed to add a citizenship question to the census to help Republicans win elections, not to protect people’s voting rights, a House committee report has concluded on Wednesday.
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 colleagues at the Department Of justice .
The documents provide the strongest evidence yet that the Trump administration aimed to exclude noncitizens from the census to sway congressional redistricting that would benefit the GOP, the report concluded, and that top officials used a false pretext , to build a legal case for claiming all residents of the United States, regardless of whether they are American citizens.
Former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross had said in congressional testimony that the government decided to add the question because it needed more accurate citizenship data to implement the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But the Supreme Court in June 2019 ruled that the rationale “appears to have been fabricated,” and a week later the Trump administration abandoned its push to ask about citizenship in the 2020 census.
Still, the protracted battle between the House committee and former President Donald J. Trump’s release of a trove of documents that could shed light on the issue continued until the end of his term. After Mr. Trump left office, the commission struck a deal with the Commerce and Justice departments to obtain the previously withheld documents.
“For years, the Trump administration has delayed and obstructed an oversight committee 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 Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney of New York, chairman of the committee.
“Today’s committee memo pulls back the curtain on this shameful behavior and makes clear how the Trump administration covertly sought to manipulate the census for political gain while lying to the public and Congress about its goals,” she said.
“Executive branch officials discussing important issues before formulating policy is evidence of good governance,” department spokesman Kevin Manning said at the time.
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The committee on Wednesday is expected to mark up a bill to strengthen the institutional independence of the Census Bureau to prevent political interference in the agency.
Wednesday’s report cited multiple drafts of an August 2017 memorandum on the citizenship question prepared by James Uttmeier, a political appointee and attorney at the Commerce Department, that showed him initially expressing skepticism and eventually strong support for including the question .
“Over two hundred years of precedent, along with significantly compelling historical and textual arguments, suggest that citizenship data probably cannot be used for the purpose of apportioning representatives,” Mr. Uttmeyer said in an early note.
In later drafts, Mr. Uttmeier and another political appointee, Earl Comstock, changed or removed language that said adding a citizenship question would likely be illegal and unconstitutional, investigators found.
“At the end of the day, we don’t make decisions about how the data should be used for distribution, that’s a decision for Congress (or possibly the president),” Mr. Uttmeier said in a later email to Mr. Comstock, which a revised memo was attached.
“I think that’s our hook here,” he wrote.
Officials also added language to emphasize the Commerce Secretary’s discretion in adding the citizenship question.
The final note reaches the opposite conclusion of the original draft, asserting that “there is nothing illegal or unconstitutional in adding a citizenship question” and asserting, “There are grounds for legal argument that the Founding Fathers intended the enumeration of the apportionment to be based on legal residents.”
A handwritten memo from Mr. Uttmeier to John Gore, a political appointee at the Justice Department, demonstrated that the political appointees 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 requesting that the “critical” information be obtained from the households. Mr. Ross later said that by adding the question to the 2020 census, the agency was complying with that request.
Every 10 years, the federal government conducts 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 census is used to allocate funds for federal programs. It also has a significant impact on the nation’s politics, as it is used to apportion representation in Congress, the Electoral College, and within state legislatures.
Adding the citizenship question would mean asking every member of every household in the country about their citizenship status.
The United States is home to about 22 million people who are not citizens but are in the country legally. Among them are green card holders, professionals on work visas and international students. About 11 million are undocumented.
Experts predicted the citizenship question would scare immigrants — both legal and undocumented — into avoiding the census, leading to an undercount of several million, likely undermining Democrats by shifting political power from diverse urban to rural areas. .
Evidence filed in lawsuits against the addition of the citizenship question suggests that partisan gain was at least a factor, and most likely its primary purpose. The new findings seem to confirm that this is the case.
In April 2019 Supreme Court arguments on the legality of including the question, the Trump administration argued that the benefits of obtaining more accurate citizenship data outweighed any harm resulting from a potentially suppressed census response.
And he rejected accusations that the Commerce Department made up a rationale 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 later emerged that Thomas B. Hoefeller, a political strategist and gerrymandering expert who died in 2018, played a role in the decision to add the question.
Mr. Ross, a billionaire businessman appointed by Mr. Trump to head the Commerce Department, is leading the effort. In announcing his decision to add the question in March 2018, he touted it as based on months of research by the Census Bureau and advice from members of Congress, businesses and groups with an interest in an accurate census.
The commission’s report said the documents described him much differently.
“The documents released today demonstrate the depth to which political actors are attempting to corrupt a fundamental function enshrined in the Constitution: the census of all people in America every 10 years,” said John C. Yang, executive director of the Asian American Center for justice, a civil rights organization that was among the parties to the citizenship issue.
“Minister Ross has chosen to pursue his policy goals by any means available,” Mr Yang said.
The Fair and Accurate Census Guarantee 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 director.
Only the director can make operational, statistical or technical decisions about the decennial count, according to the bill, and only one person can be appointed as the director’s deputy, and that person must be a career civil servant.
Terri Ann Rosenthal, a census consultant 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,” she said. “Political interference undermines the bureau’s ability to carry out that mission. Our democracy relies on the census at its core.”
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