Why the 2020 Census Citizenship Question Matters in the 2018 Elections
Robert-shapiro MAY 7, 2018
Red states will suffer if that question is asked—but Republican state attorneys general haven’t even murmured a protest.
The decennial census is a vital instrument in how Americans live their lives. Right now, the 2020 census is at risk and, with it, much that matters to all of us.
The Trump administration, led here by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, is seeking to use the census to send a message to President Trump’s base and to disadvantage their political opponents. Dismissing the advice and warnings of the statisticians and social scientists who oversee the Census Bureau, they have decided to include a question about every person’s citizenship status in the 2020 census. The result could well be a census that misses tens of millions of people, with consequences that will reverberate across the country.
Although most pundits believe that the adverse impact will be concentrated in a few blue states, closer analysis shows it could cost blue, purple, and red states seats in Congress, and cost mainly red states billions of dollars in federal funding. Yet so far, among those with the legal standing to push back against this proposal—our state attorneys general—only those in Democratic states have stepped up.
When I oversaw the 2000 Census as under secretary of commerce, I, along with the rest of the Clinton administration, took pride in our efforts to gather the most accurate information possible about everyone who lives in the United States. We knew that some $400 billion in federal funds would be disbursed annually based in part on census data—the number is $800 billion today—and that the fair allocation of seats in the House of Representatives depended on the accuracy and completeness of the census.
Even worse, perhaps, than Ross’s decision to include a citizenship question is his stated rationale, which is to help Sessions and the Department of Justice enforce the Voting Rights Act (an improbable concern for Sessions, who long has favored weakening the act). Ross’s statement raises the specter that the census will share individual personal information with law enforcement and other agencies. Such sharing would violate federal law as well as norms in place since the first census in 1790.
http://prospect.org/article/why-2020-census-citizenship-question-matters-2018-elections
