America was already great when dumb Trump managed to eke out a win in the Electoral College. Now Trump is determined to wreck America, one constitutional institution at a time.
The decennial Census is no exception. Maybe Trump didn't know about the Census, but once Attorney General Jeff Sessions told him about it, the two got to thinking about how to use it to express their racist hatred of immigrants.
ProPublica has brought to light a December 12 letter in which Department of Justice lawyer Arthur Gary asks Ron Jarmin at the Census Bureau to reinstate the citizenship question, which, if I understand correctly, was dropped right after the 1950 Census.
Supposedly the Justice Department is concerned that minority voters could be disenfranchised by voter fraud. Reinstating the citizenship question is one funny way of going about it.
Any moderately intelligent person can look at the projections for the 2020 Electoral College map and connect the dots: Republicans want states like California to lose electors and congressmen.
The Hill published an op-ed that on the surface seems like a perfectly reasonable justification for the citizenship question: we need more accurate citizenship data. But the author of the op-ed is the media director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).
That’s an organization classified a hate group by the Southern Law Poverty Center. I forget that every so often, but when i clicked over to their website (linked from The Hill) and scrolled down just a little bit, I saw the headline “examples of serious crimes by illegal aliens.”
Definitely a hate group. Illegal immigrants do much vital, thankless work, for very little pay. By the way, you have to be a U. S. Citizen to work for the U. S. Census Bureau. You don’t have to be a citizen to enlist in the U. S. Armed Forces, though at least you have to be a legal resident.
Isn’t there some kind of government agency that keeps track of who is a citizen and who is a legal resident, so that when the military or the Census asks, they can get an answer? Doesn’t that government agency have at least some data on illegal immigrants?
I know both of these facts about qualification to serve in the military and to serve in the Census from personal experience. I was an enumerator for the 2010 Census, for the Non-Respondent Follow Up (NRFU, pronounced “narfoo”) phase and the Vacant Delete Check phase.
I talked to several non-respondents who are immigrants from Mexico. Almost every time, a father would emphasize that at least his youngest child was born here in America, if not all his children.
That was always unprompted. I wrote it down in the notes because I thought it would help them feel at ease.
There were people who didn’t want to talk to me. How much fewer people will want to talk to an enumerator in 2020 if they’re worried, realistically or not, that some of their relatives might get deported as a direct consequence?
I care about families being torn apart. But I also care about the integrity of the Census.
This bit of news about the Census adds urgency to the 2018 elections. It is even more important now that Democrats regain a majority in the House so that when Trump and Pence are forced out, a Democrat can be Speaker of the House and begin to undo the extensive damage Trump’s maladministration has caused America.