Trump wants a new mid-decade census

 

Pretty sure that's the point.

Also, pretty sure he has the power.  Whether he has the authority is a different question.

UPDATE 08/12/2025:

Funny.  In Trump's language ...

Because they can't win if they don't cheat

Thomas B. Hofeller achieved near-mythic status in the Republican Party as the Michelangelo of gerrymandering, the architect of partisan political maps that cemented the party’s dominance across the country.

But after he died last summer, his estranged daughter discovered hard drives in her father’s home that revealed something else: Mr. Hofeller had played a crucial role in the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

Files on those drives showed that he wrote a study in 2015 concluding that adding a citizenship question to the census would allow Republicans to draft even more extreme gerrymandered maps to stymie Democrats.

  NYT

Exactly what Dems and all honest people said it was about.

Ms. Hofeller said her decision to open her father’s files to his opponents was a bid for transparency, devoid of personal or political animus. Although she believed he was undermining American democracy, she said, their estrangement stemmed not from partisan differences, but a family dispute that ended up in court. Ms. Hofeller described herself as a political progressive who despises Republican partisanship, but also has scant respect for Democrats.

Her father, she said, was a brilliant cartographer who was deeply committed to traditional conservative principles like free will and limited government. As a child, she said, she was schooled in those same principles, but every successive gerrymandered map he created only solidified her conviction that he had abandoned them in a quest to entrench his party in permanent control.

[...]

[M]onths after urging President Trump’s transition team to tack the question onto the census, [Hofeller] wrote the key portion of a draft Justice Department letter claiming the question was needed to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act — the rationale the administration later used to justify its decision.

Too bad he died and had a democratically minded daughter who let the cat out of the bag.

Those documents, cited in a federal court filing Thursday by opponents seeking to block the citizenship question, have emerged only weeks before the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the legality of the citizenship question.

And they're going to be unable to hide their true colors if they rule in favor of it.

In Supreme Court arguments in April over the legality of the decision, the Trump administration argued that the benefits of obtaining more accurate citizenship data offset any damage stemming from the likely depressed response to the census by minority groups and noncitizens. And it dismissed charges that the Commerce Department had simply invented a justification for adding the question to the census as unsupported by the evidence.

[...]

In a statement issued on Thursday evening, the Justice Department said the accusations in the filing were baseless and amounted to “a last-ditch effort to derail the Supreme Court’s consideration of this case.” It said Mr. Hofeller’s 2015 study had “played no role in the department’s December 2017 request to reinstate a citizenship question to the 2020 decennial census.”

Looks like the Brooklyn Bridge might be up for sale again.

Opponents said that the Justice Department’s rationale for seeking to add a citizenship question to the census was baldly contrived, a conclusion shared by federal judges in all three lawsuits opposing the administration’s action.

But a majority of the Supreme Court justices seemed inclined to accept the department’s explanation the question was needed to enforce the Voting Rights Act, and appeared ready to uphold the administration’s authority to alter census questions as it sees fit. The justices are expected to issue a final ruling before the court’s term ends in late June.

[...]

In nearly 230 years, the census has never asked all respondents whether they are American citizens. But while adding such a question might appear uncontroversial on its face, opponents have argued that it is actually central to a Republican strategy to skew political boundaries to their advantage when redistricting begins in 2021.

They just got a big boost for their argument.

UPDATE 9/7:  The New Yorker has an excellent, eye-opening, and infuriating article on Thomas Hofeller's secret files.

Do you trust Wilbur Ross?

Define "shared".
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Meanwhile in the Trump Court

You may have forgotten in all the noise that the administration* was planning to reintroduce a citizenship question on the 2020 Census. The Census is the province of the Department of Commerce, presently under the direction of Secretary Wilbur Ross, a man who once claimed to have misplaced two billion dollars.

A group of state attorneys general found all of this very suspicious and filed a lawsuit. Ross tried to fob the whole thing off on the Department of Justice. Back in July, a federal judge allowed the lawsuit to proceed, and, in doing so, announced that Ross's reasons for including the citizenship question were, at best, at variance with what the judge believed to be the truth.

[...]

In short, two departments of this administration* concocted a bogus story to add a bogus citizenship question to the census for purely political reasons as part of its overall plan to rig the immigration system in profoundly racist ways. And a federal judge caught them—and Ross, as well. Enter Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch.

On Monday, the Supreme Court blocked a deposition that Ross was scheduled to give as part of that lawsuit. (It allowed another deposition to go forward.) But, as Stern explains, Gorsuch wanted to go much further in deference to the current executive branch.

In a partial dissent, Gorsuch, joined by Thomas, wrote that he would have blocked both officials’ depositions, as well as any discovery beyond the record the Commerce Department already compiled.

[...]

Gorsuch conveniently leaves out Furman’s most critical finding: that Ross lied about his reasons for adding the citizenship question. Initially, Ross insisted—under oath before Congress—that he began considering the question in response to the DOJ’s request. A document obtained in discovery, however, reveals that Ross himself pushed the DOJ to submit this request, contradicting his earlier sworn testimony.

[...]

During his decade on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Gorsuch built his reputation as a skeptic of the “administrative state,” those executive branch agencies tasked with implementing federal law. He is an outspoken critic of the rule that courts should defer to these agencies’ reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes...Apparently not. Instead of sticking to his principles, Gorsuch is running interference for the Trump administration, urging the courts to let the administrative state misapply federal law and then suppress all evidence under the guise of privilege. That’s a disappointing departure from the justice’s legal philosophy—one that seems tailored to let Wilbur Ross sabotage the census in an effort to entrench Republican power for a decade.

Sooner or later, Camp Runamuck will close down for good. But that which the Republicans sold their collective souls to entrench will be with us for years.

  Charles P Pierce

I wish I could be as sure this administration will pass in time.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Coming to a census near you

Because people in this climate are going to turn themselves in as illegals?  What's the point?  Just to foment fear would be my guess.

Or they're really as ignorant as Jeff Sessions looks.

But, here's their stated excuse..

DOJ needs better citizenship data to better enforce the Voting Rights Act “and its important protections against racial discrimination in voting.”

  ProPublica

Yeah, literally unbelievable.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Trump ideal: Government for personal revenge

Politico reports that the Trump administration is leaning toward appointing Thomas Brunell to the top operational job running the Census. While Brunell “appears to have little experience in federal statistics or at managing a big organization, both characteristics that census-watchers believe are vital for the job,” he does have one point on his résumé that makes him deeply attractive for the post. He is a committed advocate of Republican gerrymandering efforts, and the author of a book titled Redistricting and Representation: Why Competitive Elections Are Bad for America. The Census is written into the Constitution and serves an essential governing function. Nobody has ever before thought to turn the direction of it over to a figure whose public career is so closely identified with partisan maneuvering.

Trump has openly called for using the Department of Justice and the FBI to prosecute his political opponents. [...] Having repeatedly threatened the news media, there is almost no way for CNN not to suspect the Department of Justice’s anomalously harsh regulation of its parent-company merger is a form of retaliation for its coverage.

[...]

The use of government as a tool of vengeance is not merely a recurring theme of Trump’s government. It is, in at least some cases, an explicitly articulated public philosophy.

[...]

Supply-side economics has given way to revenge-o-nomics.

  NY Magazine

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:  Yet another example.