“The documents released today
demonstrate the depths to which political actors sought to corrupt a basic
function enumerated in the Constitution: the counting of all people in America
every 10 years,” said John C. Yang, executive director of the Asian American
Justice Center, a civil rights organization that was among the litigants over
the citizenship question.
New
Findings Detail Trump Plan to Use Census for Partisan Gain
A new trove of memos and emails suggest
that the plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census aimed to cause
an undercount that would favor Republicans.
July 20, 2022Updated 12:13
p.m. ET
A new stash of documents obtained by
Congress has confirmed that the Trump administration pushed to add a
citizenship question to the census to help Republicans win elections, not to
protect people’s voting rights, a House committee report concluded on Wednesday.
The report from the Committee on
Oversight and Reform, the culmination of a yearslong investigation, detailed
new findings based on drafts of internal memos and secret email communications
between political appointees at the Commerce Department, which oversees the
Census Bureau, and counterparts in the Justice Department.
The documents
provided the most definitive evidence yet that the Trump administration aimed
to exclude noncitizens from the count to influence congressional apportionment
that would benefit the Republican Party, the report concluded, and that senior
officials used a false pretext to build a legal case for asking all residents
of the United States whether they were American citizens.
Former Commerce
Secretary Wilbur Ross had said in congressional testimony that the government
decided to add the question because it required more accurate data on
citizenship to enforce the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But the Supreme Court in
June 2019 ruled that the rationale “appears to have been contrived,” and a week later the
Trump administration abandoned its quest to ask about citizenship in the 2020
census.
Still, a protracted fight between the House committee and
former President Donald J. Trump over the release of a trove of documents that
might shed light on the matter stretched to the end of his term. After Mr.
Trump left office, the committee entered into an agreement with the departments
of Commerce and Justice to obtain the previously withheld documents.
“For years, the Trump
administration delayed and obstructed the oversight committee’s investigation
into the true reason for adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census, even
after the Supreme Court ruled the administration’s efforts were illegal,” said
Representative Carolyn B. Maloney of New York, chairwoman of the committee.
“Today’s committee
memo pulls back the curtain on this shameful conduct and shows clearly how the
Trump administration secretly tried to manipulate the census for political gain
while lying to the public and Congress about their goals,” she said.
When some internal
communications first came to light in 2018, the Commerce Department said that
nothing in them contradicted the rationale Mr. Ross had earlier offered to
Congress.
“Executive branch officials discussing
important issues prior to formulating policy is evidence of good government,” a
department spokesman, Kevin Manning, said at the time.
Read
More on the U.S. Census
·
A Slow Process: The
Census Bureau said it would not be able to release many of the statistics from the 2020 census until
2023. The pandemic is partly to blame.
·
Privacy Issues: To
shield the respondents’ identities, the bureau relies on technology that
produces low-quality data. Those studying the census are not pleased.
·
A Flawed System: The
2020 census undercounted Hispanic, Black and Native American residents,
as well as the population of certain states. Some say it’s
time to rethink the longstanding model.
·
1950 Census: Federal
law kept millions of census forms secret for 72 years. The information recently went online, a bonanza for historians and curious
minds.
The committee was expected on Wednesday
to mark up a bill to enhance the institutional independence of the Census
Bureau in order to prevent political interference in the agency.
The report on Wednesday cites multiple
drafts of an August 2017 memo about the citizenship question prepared by James
Uthmeier, a political appointee and lawyer at the Commerce Department, that
show him initially expressing skepticism and eventually forceful support for
inclusion of the question.
“Over two hundred years of precedent,
along with substantially convincing historical and textual arguments suggest
that citizenship data likely cannot be used for purposes of apportioning
representatives,” Mr. Uthmeier said in an early memo.
In later drafts, Mr. Uthmeier and
another political appointee, Earl Comstock, altered or removed language that
said that adding a citizenship question was likely to be illegal and
unconstitutional, the investigators found.
“Ultimately, we do
not make decisions on how the data should be used for apportionment, that is
for Congress (or possibly the president) to decide,” Mr. Uthmeier said in a
later email to Mr. Comstock, to which a revised memo was attached.
“I think that’s our hook here,” he
wrote.
Officials also added
language to emphasize the commerce secretary’s discretion over adding the
citizenship question.
The final memo reached the opposite
conclusion of the initial draft, asserting that “there is nothing illegal or
unconstitutional about adding a citizenship question” and claiming, “There are
bases for legal arguments that the founding fathers intended for the
apportionment count to be based on legal inhabitants.”
A handwritten note from Mr. Uthmeier to
John Gore, a political appointee at the Justice Department, demonstrated that
the political appointees had steered the Justice Department to ask the Commerce
Department to add the citizenship question, the report said.
The Justice Department ultimately sent
a formal request in December 2017 to the Commerce Department requesting that
the “critical” information be obtained from households. Mr. Ross stated later
that, in adding the question to the 2020 census, the agency was fulfilling that
request.
Mr. Ross could not be reached for
comment, but a spokeswoman for the office of the Florida governor, where Mr.
Uthmeier now works as chief of staff, said in a statement that Mr. Uthmeier had
worked to get a citizenship question in the census because “it would be helpful
to know how many people are in this country illegally.”
“You wouldn’t think
that would be a controversial policy, given that it had previously been on the
census surveys for over 150 years,” added the spokeswoman, Christina Pushaw.
(Questions related to citizenship were removed from the census after 1950 to improve
accuracy and response rates.)
Every 10 years, the
federal government conducts a census to count all people in the country.
Everyone is counted without exception, whether they are adults or children,
citizens or noncitizens.
The count is used to allocate funds to
federal programs. It also has a significant impact on the nation’s politics,
because it is used to apportion representation in Congress, the Electoral
College and within state legislatures.
Adding the citizenship question would
have meant asking every member of every household in the country about their
citizenship status.
The United States is
home to some 22 million people who are not citizens but are in the country
legally. Among them are green-card holders, professionals on work visas and
foreign students. About 11 million are undocumented.
Experts predicted that the citizenship
question would have intimidated immigrants — both legal and undocumented — into
shunning the census, resulting in an undercount of several million that would
most likely have undermined Democrats, by shifting political power from
diverse, urban areas to rural ones.
Evidence filed in
lawsuits against adding the citizenship question suggested that partisan gain
was at least a factor, and most likely its main objective. The new findings
seem to confirm this was the case.
In Supreme Court
arguments in April 2019 over the legality of including the question, 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.
And it dismissed charges that the
Commerce Department had concocted a justification for adding the question to
the census.
During its investigation, the House
committee found that as early as 2015, members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle,
including Steve Bannon, began discussing the possibility of adding a
citizenship question to the census. And it later surfaced that Thomas B. Hofeller, a political strategist and expert
on gerrymandering who died in 2018, had played a role in the decision to add
the question.
Mr. Ross, a billionaire businessman appointed
by Mr. Trump to head the Commerce Department, led the effort. In announcing his
decision to add the question in March 2018, he portrayed it as being based on
months of research by the Census Bureau and advice from members of Congress,
businesses and groups with a stake in an accurate count.
The committee report
said the documents depicted it much differently.
“The documents released today
demonstrate the depths to which political actors sought to corrupt a basic
function enumerated in the Constitution: the counting of all people in America
every 10 years,” said John C. Yang, executive director of the Asian American
Justice Center, a civil rights organization that was among the litigants over
the citizenship question.
“Secretary Ross chose
to pursue his political goals through whatever means available,” Mr. Yang said.
The Ensuring a Fair
and Accurate Census Act, drafted by Ms. Maloney, would seek to insulate the
agency from political pressure by limiting to three the number of political
appointees allowed at the Census Bureau, including the agency’s director.
Only the director could make
operational, statistical or technical decisions for the decennial count,
according to the bill, and only one person could be appointed deputy by the director
and that person must be a career civil servant.
Terri Ann Rosenthal, a consultant on
census matters to civil rights groups, said legislation was vital to protecting
the agency and to restoring public confidence in its integrity.
“There is nothing more
critical to a democratic system of governance than objective, trustworthy
statistics,” she said. “Political meddling undermines the bureau’s ability to
carry out that mission. Our democracy relies on a census at its core.”