Very soon, the Supreme Court will rule on whether or not a citizenship question can be added to the census in 2020. The case was argued before the Court back in April. Back then, the majority of the justices seemed inclined to support the administration*'s position that it had no sub rosa political agenda in arguing for the citizenship question. Now, in a filing in a related lawsuit in the Southern District of New York, we discover that the Nine Wise Souls did not have all the relevant information—specifically, that the administration* was as truthless in this instance as it is in everything else.

Last summer, a guy named Thomas Hofeller died. Hofeller was largely unknown, but he was the Republican party's guru on the subject of rigging electoral districts for political advantage. He was the reason that so many Republican state legislatures concocted electoral maps that looked as though they'd been painted by Jackson Pollock. He was every bit as influential as he was unknown. After Hofeller died, his estranged daughter went spelunking through his computers and, on his hard drives, discovered files that demonstrated quite clearly that her father had been central to the creation of the citizenship question, and that it was created to serve as a weapon to perpetuate Republican partisan power. From The New York Times:

Files on those drives showed that he wrote a study in 2015 concluding that adding a citizenship question to the census would allow Republicans to draft even more extreme gerrymandered maps to stymie Democrats. And months after urging President Trump’s transition team to tack the question onto the census, he wrote the key portion of a draft Justice Department letter claiming the question was needed to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act — the rationale the administration later used to justify its decision.

Those documents, cited in a federal court filing Thursday by opponents seeking to block the citizenship question, have emerged only weeks before the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the legality of the citizenship question. Critics say adding the question would deter many immigrants from being counted and shift political power to Republican areas.

The filing makes Hofeller's role explicit, and it also tees up a couple of administration* officials for having lied to various tribunals about the administration's reasons for including the question.

The new evidence reveals that Dr. Thomas Hofeller, the longtime Republican redistricting specialist, played a significant role in orchestrating the addition of the citizenship question to the 2020 Decennial Census in order to create a structural electoral advantage for, in his own words, “Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites,” and that Defendants obscured his role through affirmative misrepresentations.

Specifically, new evidence shows that: (1) Dr. Hofeller concluded in a 2015 study that adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census “would clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats” and “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites” in redistricting; (2) in August 2017, Dr. Hofeller helped ghostwrite a draft DOJ letter to Commerce requesting a citizenship question and providing the Voting Rights Act enforcement rationale for doing so; (3) Neuman gave this ghostwritten draft DOJ letter to Gore in October 2017; and (4) the letter that DOJ eventually sent to Commerce in December 2017 adopted the same VRA rationale and bears striking similarities to Dr. Hofeller’s 2015 study stating that a citizenship question on the Census was essential to advantaging Republicans and white voters.

This would be an astonishing revelation, if the country were capable of being astonished anymore. The president is far from the only banana in the republic.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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