Hood is off Trump administration's lie about census
By Dana Milbank
The Washington Post
Last week, the hood came off.
The Trump administration has devised a fundamentally racist policy: adding a question to the 2020 census that will suppress participation by nonwhite people and, therefore, artificially increase white (and Republican) power in a new round of gerrymandering.
To do this, administration officials falsely told the public, the lower courts and the Supreme Court that the disadvantage to nonwhite Americans was statistically questionable and that the Justice Department needed the change to enforce the Voting Rights Act.
But documents released last week prove this all to be a ruse, and that the officials lied about their motives.
The documents (from the files of the late architect of the plan) show that this gerrymandering expert, Thomas Hofeller, whose role the Trump administration did not disclose to the courts, authored a 2015 study saying his scheme (to use voting-age citizens for redistricting rather than total population) would require a “radical redrawing” of legislative districts that would “be advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.” This “would clearly be a disadvantage for the Democrats,” he wrote, packing Democratic voters into fewer districts and “strengthening the adjoining GOP districts.”
He warned that Latino voters would perceive it as “an attempt to diminish their voting strength.” Hofeller proposed laundering the idea by having the Justice Department claim it needed the citizenship question for voting-rights enforcement, and he wrote the framework of the request that the department eventually sent.
The Trump administration’s top lawyer, Solicitor General Noel Francisco, told the Supreme Court in April that voting-rights enforcement was “the principal benefit” of the proposed change. That was false. The “principal benefit,” we now see, is to increase white power. Now, the racist policy is spelled out in black and white.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/milbank-hood-is-off-trump-administrations-lie-about-census/
