Daily Beast by Jay Michaelson 04.22.19
It’s no exaggeration to say the census question could decide the 2024 election, and that’s what’s at stake as the Supreme Court takes up Department of Commerce v. New York.If the Trump administration succeeds in adding the question “Are you a U.S. Citizen?†to the 2020 census, the Census Bureau estimates that 6.5 million people won’t respond to the census at all.
Most of those will be Hispanics or people with immigrants in their families who are fearful of exposing themselves or their family members to deportation, investigation, or worse. According to a Harvard University study, between 7.7 and 9.1 percent of Hispanics will skip the census entirely.
And that, in turn, will lead to fewer representatives in the House from states with large Hispanic populations—like California, New York, Illinois, Arizona, and Texas—and, accordingly, fewer electors in the electoral college to choose a president.
It’s no exaggeration to say that the 2024 election could be decided on the basis of this census question.
That’s what’s at stake this week as the Supreme Court takes up the case of Department of Commerce v. New York, representing four challenges to the citizenship question.
As we’ve learned over the course of those lawsuits, these anti-democratic effects of the question aren’t unintended consequences: they’re the whole reason it’s in there. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, whose department oversees the census, lied about the reasons for the change, failed to follow the law on making it, and illegally ignored the opinion of the Census Bureau itself, which urged him against it.
If true (as several lower courts have found), these are violations both of administrative law and of Article I, Sections 1 and 2 of the Constitution, which provides that for the purposes of determining congressional representation, “The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct."
The “Enumeration Clause,†as it is known, has been held to require the government to get the best count possible. Here, however, Ross and his minions went against the advice of their own department, their own experts, and five previous directors of the census bureau (Republicans and Democrats alike), who said that the citizenship question would lead to an inaccurate count of how many people reside in the United States.
More:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/department-of-commerce-v-new-york-supreme-court-case-could-decide-2024-election-9