Just confirmed Administration lying in census case

By Eric Levitz

The Census Act requires the federal government to get a rough count of the U.S. population every ten years using the best available tools and techniques. The Trump administration says that to fulfill this duty in 2020, it will need to add a new question to the Census — one that asks respondents to disclose their citizenship status.

This is an odd claim. The primary objective of the Census is to count every human being in the United States, not every citizen. And a large body of research suggests that adding a citizenship question will discourage undocumented immigrants from participating — and thus lead the government to systematically undercount them. In fact, the administration’s own estimates suggest that adding the question will cause 6.5 million fewer American residents to respond. The Census Bureau’s chief scientist, meanwhile, has said that adding such a question is “very costly, harms the quality of the census count, and would use substantially less accurate citizenship-status data than are available from administrative sources.”

Cynics suspected the inaccuracy is the point. After all, members of the Trump administration have argued that demographic change is a threat to the conservative movement’s political power and that the Democratic Party uses undocumented immigration to inflate its own political power. And undermining an accurate Census — in a manner that systematically undercounts undocumented immigrants — would address both of those purported problems. Census data shapes the contours of political districts and determines each state’s clout in the Electoral College. It dictates what proportion of federal funding for schools, roads, and libraries each state is entitled to. Thus, if the Trump administration found a facially neutral way of systematically undercounting residents in Democratic-leaning areas, it could inflate red America’s (already disproportionate) influence over our political system ...

On Wednesday morning, Donald Trump celebrated his impending triumph by ostensibly admitting his administration’s argument had been a fraud ...

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