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Unpublished internal communications indicate that the Trump administration tried to add a citizenship question to the census with the goal of affecting the distribution of Congress, according to a report issued Wednesday by the House Oversight and Reform Committee.
The documents appear to contradict statements made under oath by then-Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, who told the committee that the push for a citizenship issue had nothing to do with the deal and that the reason for adding it was to help enforce the Voting Rights Act.
The nearly 500 documents include several drafts of an August 2017 memorandum prepared by a Commerce Department lawyer and designated politician, James Uthmeier, in which he initially warned that using a citizenship question to distribute would probably be illegal and would violate the constitution, according to the report.
In later drafts, Uthmeier and another designated politician, Earl Comstock, revised the draft to say that there was “nothing illegal or unconstitutional in adding a citizenship issue” and claimed that the founding fathers “they intended that the cast count was based on the legal inhabitants.” said the report. In December 2017, the Department of Justice sent a formal request to the Department of Commerce, which oversees the Census Bureau, asking it to add the question; in March 2018, Ross announced that he would be added to the 2020 census.
“Today’s Committee note removes the veil of this shameful conduct and clearly shows how the Trump Administration secretly tried to manipulate the census for political gain while lying to the public and Congress about its goals,” he said. say Supervisory Committee Chair Carolyn B. Maloney (DN. Y.) said in a statement.
The administration’s effort to add the question lasted two years. He was challenged by civil rights groups who criticized him as an effort to underestimate Latinos and scare immigrant communities from participating in a poll that determines the distribution and redistribution of congressional districts, as well as the disbursement of 1 , $ 5 trillion in federal funds annually.
The new evidence echoes documents that emerged during the litigation on the issue, including a study by a Republican agent who found that adding a citizenship question would benefit Republicans in redistributing districts.
“It was obvious it was just a scam,” said former Census Bureau director John Thompson, who testified at the time, saying the office under Ross had not done proper testing on the citizenship issue. before adding it. “I’m glad the committee has the materials to bolster it, but it wasn’t surprising.”
Thomas Wolf, deputy director of the Democracy Program at NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, said, “So that no one doubts that what the Trump administration was doing was wrong, these documents show that even the administration itself Trump knew what he was doing was illegal. ”
The Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that the administration’s stated justification for adding the question was “artificial” and the administration abandoned the effort. He then said he would prevent undocumented immigrants from being counted for distribution, sparking another explosion of court battles that lasted until the final days of Donald Trump’s presidency.
This attempt finally failed when, due to pandemic-related delays, the Census Bureau was unable to hand over the totals of the state population to the president before he left office. The administration has also been unable to explain how it planned to identify and count undocumented immigrants, for whom there is no official count.
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The documents obtained by the committee had been withheld by the Trump administration despite the citations, according to the report, and adds that the committee had faced “unprecedented obstruction” by administration officials. Ross and then Attorney General William P. Barr were considered in contempt of Congress after refusing to present them, the report notes, adding that documents previously withheld or drafted were eventually published “after more of two years of litigation and the arrival of a new administration ”.
Maloney last week introduced a bill that he said is designed to protect the Census Bureau from future attempts to politicize it. HR 8326, the Act to ensure a fair and accurate census, would prevent the removal of a director of the Census Bureau without just cause, limit the number of designated politicians to office and prohibit the Secretary of Commerce from adding topics or questions to the survey “unless he has followed existing statutory requirements to notify Congress in advance.” That he would It also prevents new questions from appearing on the ten-year census form unless they have been “investigated, 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 am very excited about the bill. … I hope it is enacted. “
But even if it is, it may not completely isolate the office from partisan interference, he said. Under a Republican House and Senate, “Congress could order the Census Bureau to pick up citizenship [information] in the census, and then there could be a struggle to get the citizenship question in the 2030 census, ”he said, adding,“ Congress could try to pass a law that says a distribution by citizenship is needed. ”
The bar to pass a constitutional amendment would be high, Wolf said. However, the Trump administration’s effort to add the issue of citizenship and exclude undocumented people from distribution “indicates that the 2020 census was in grave danger and we only escaped thanks to a combination of legal victories. significant and some luck, ”he said. “The census is clearly too fragile to continue in its endangered state.”
In addition to limiting political appointments and giving additional powers to the director of the Census Bureau, as proposed by Maloney’s bill, Wolf suggested restricting the president’s ability to influence distribution, as proposed by Trump. By law, it is assumed that the redistribution of the 435 seats in the House will be done automatically based on the totals of the state population.
“The president’s role in the distribution process was supposed to be administrative,” Wolf said. “That’s why it’s called automatic sharing.”