Obama/Holder group to join legal challenge to 2020 Census citizenship question

[RandySF]

Washington, D.C. — Today, Eric H. Holder, Jr., 82nd Attorney General of the United States and Chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC), released the following statement on the Commerce Department’s decision to include a citizenship question on the 2020 Census.

“We will litigate to stop the Administration from moving forward with this irresponsible decision. The addition of a citizenship question to the census questionnaire is a direct attack on our representative democracy. This question will lower the response rate and undermine the accuracy of the count, leading to devastating, decade-long impacts on voting rights and the distribution of billions of dollars in federal funding. By asking this question, states will not have accurate representation and individuals in impacted communities will lose out on state and federal funding for health care, education, and infrastructure.

“Contrary to the Administration’s stated rationale, asking the citizenship question on the census is not critical to enforcing the Voting Rights Act. As attorney general, I did not—nor did my predecessors—request the addition of a citizenship question to the decennial census to enforce the VRA. We did not need to: Data derived from the existing census process was perfectly adequate for any voting litigation that arose.

“Make no mistake – this decision is motivated purely by politics. In deciding to add this question without even testing its effects, the Administration is departing from decades of census policy and ignoring the warnings of census experts.”



https://democraticredistricting.com/holder-statement-on-the-trump-administrations-decision-to-include-a-citizenship-question-on-the-2020-census/

[mr_lebowski]

1. Direct attack on Sanctuary Cities, make no mistake ... CA in particular is a target ...

All those negatives listed ... are all positives in the Wingnuts minds. Make the 'non-citizens' ... invisible, make them 'not count', so they'll just be a burden on the States themselves. It's actually genius ... in a completely Un-American, Evil, Flagrantly-Cheating sort of way.

Unless it's illegal (which I don't know), may make sense to get out the word to people, telling them that even if they're NOT citizens, that they should simply lie and say 'yes' on this question rather than not responding at all.

Hopefully at least there's also an option for various other statuses like 'legal resident', 'guest worker', etc, but I suspect that if the Dump Admin gets their way, there won't be. And thus they'll set about calculating everything based on 'citizen count' rather than 'person count'. Seems like EXACTLY the sorta bullshit they'd pull.

Middle Murka on average I'm sure has notably higher % of regular US citizens (not green card, not guest worker, not undocumented folks) vs. populations of Coastal Areas and Big Cities, so the lower response rate on the Census Questionnaires in these areas means that this simple act (if they don't lose in court) will BIGLY increase the already OUTRAGEOUSLY unfair amount of political power held by citizens of smaller, rural, mostly-white states. It also may have enough of an impact to shift some electoral votes and congressional boundaries around ... in the GOP's favor.

All in all, it's just further evidence that the Reic ... err ... RIGHT ... knows that they cannot win Elections without cheating and disenfranchising Democratic Voters. So cheat and disenfranchise they will DO.

Such Pigs.

Have I mentioned lately ... Fuck the GOP?

[Lee-Lee]

5. I would NOT advise people to lie to the census workers

It is illegal.

And if they are non-citizens working to get citizenship committing a crime could make that harder or mean they end up disqualified for citizenship.

[NCTraveler]

2. K&R nt

[Cha]

3. Mahalo President Obama and AG Holder!

[Lee-Lee]

4. Its backdoor gerrymandering but worse

Make non-citizens and those with non-citizens in their households afraid to answer the census.

That lowers the count in areas with large immigrant and undocumented immigrant populations.

That makes blue areas appear less populated.

That sets the stage for everything from blue states losing seats in the House of Reprenatives to district lines redrawn to make districts less blue because they have to expand from urban areas to suburbs for the same number of people in the district.

Then that also sets the stage for redistribution of all kinds of federal funding on everything from education to disaster relief to Medicaid funding, taking from blue areas to give to red.

Sadly, I doubt the legal challenges to this will stop it. It seems the executive branch has pretty wide latitude to ask questions like this on the census and that people may not want to answer probably isn’t strong enough basis to challenge it and succeed. There are lots of other places where the Federal Government asks citizen status and its legal.

[Gothmog]

6. Statement from the DNRC

Link to tweet