In a morning press release, Democratic Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform Elijah Cummings announced that the committee has filed a bipartisan report recommending that both Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross be held in contempt of Congress. The contempt recommendation comes after both Barr and Ross refused to speak to Congress about the reason that a question on citizenship was added to the 2020 census form, and after other witnesses were blocked from discussing the issue.
Included with the recommendation is a transcript of the committee’s interview with former Ross adviser James Uthmeier. The transcript shows that officials at the Department of Commerce blocked Uthmeier from replying almost one hundred times. He didn’t answer questions about the advice he gave on the citizenship question. He wouldn’t answer when asked whom he had spoken to about the idea. He wouldn’t talk about a secret memo he wrote on the topic and hand-delivered to the Justice Department.
Even so, Cummings says it wasn’t completely useless to have the former adviser testify. “Despite these restrictions, Mr. Uthmeier provided the Committee with some new information,” wrote the committee chair. “He disclosed that he sought advice on adding the citizenship question from John Baker, an outspoken advocate who has argued that ‘the citizenship question is necessary to collect the data for a redistricting of House seats that excludes aliens from the calculation.’ Mr. Baker’s views on the citizenship question have nothing to do with enforcing the Voting Rights Act, but instead are focused on redistricting.”
That testimony appears to completely undercut claims from the Commerce Department. It shows that the citizenship question was part of a scheme cooked up even before Trump took office, based on advice from “Republican gerrymandering expert Thomas Hofeller,” who instructed Trump officials on how adding this question “would be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.”
Also behind the scheme appears to be former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. Which would seem to be required—it’s apparently impossible to have a discussion about denying rights to Americans, or about hateful behavior toward immigrants, that doesn’t include Kobach.
Kobach—despite his embarrassing election losses, making a fool of himself in court, and failing to find roughly 5 million of the 5 million fraudulent votes Trump claims were cast in 2016—still appears to be a welcome presence at the Trump White House. He was one of those urging Ross to make sure the citizenship question was on the census form. That included sending an email to the commerce secretary to address the “problem” that undocumented immigrants “are still counted for congressional apportionment purposes.” Which is only a problem only if your goal is wrecking the census to make sure that “Republicans and non-Hispanic whites” enjoy disproportionate representation.
Everything that the committee has discovered has laid waste to Trump’s laughable claims that the citizenship question was somehow added to help enforce the Voting Rights Act. But exposing the truth has driven the committee—again—up against the boundaries of the extraordinarily expansive view of executive privilege that’s been in place since Trump took office.
The issue in this instance is not connected to either the Mueller report or any other aspect of the investigation into the 2016 election that has already generated a raft of missed subpoenas and possible contempt citations. That may allow this issue to move forward on the House floor more quickly, without concerns about how it fits into a “package” of other possible actions.