Oh, look. Somebody woke up Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross and told ol’ Wilbur that it was his turn to be a useful tool of the local oligarchy. It’s not too early to think about the 2020 census, especially if you suspect that your brand is going so rancid that you might not have the control of it that you had in 2010.

From The New York Times:

In a statement released Monday, the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, said Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross had “determined that reinstatement of a citizenship question on the 2020 decennial census questionnaire is necessary to provide complete and accurate census block level data,” allowing the department to accurately measure the portion of the population eligible to vote. But his decision immediately invited a legal challenge: Xavier Becerra, California’s attorney general, plans to sue the Trump administration over the decision, a spokeswoman for Mr. Becerra said late Monday.



Critics of the change and experts in the Census Bureau itself have said that, amid a fiery immigration debate, the inclusion of a citizenship question could prompt immigrants who are in the country illegally not to respond. That would result in a severe undercount of the population — and, in turn, faulty data for government agencies and outside groups that rely on the census. The effects would also bleed into the redistricting of the House and state legislatures in the next decade.

Right from the start—“and three-fifths of all other persons”—this country has made a botch of its demographics as regards to representation in the national legislature. As citizenship, and the franchise, have expanded through the years, the forces of reaction have had to get increasingly creative. This is one of their latest and greatest.

In a memorandum explaining his decision, Mr. Ross wrote that he had considered opponents’ arguments about the potential to discourage responses. “I find that the need for accurate citizenship data and the limited burden that the reinstatement of the citizenship question would impose outweigh fears about a potentially lower response rate,” he wrote.

The country stopped asking the citizenship question on the census in 1950, before I was born. Things have rocked right along swimmingly without it. But now it’s all blended in with the general conservative attack on the franchise and the sudden conservative devotion to the rigged wheel on election day, so it’s time for the question to make a comeback.

After all, this is the administration* that tried to put a guy in charge of the census who wrote a paper about why competitive elections are bad for America, and also one that refused to hire non-citizen census takers. So it’s pretty clear that they woke Wilbur up as part of an ongoing attempt to use the census to ratfck upcoming elections.

“The census numbers provide the backbone for planning how our communities can grow and thrive in the coming decade,” said Mr. Becerra. “What the Trump administration is requesting is not just alarming, it is an unconstitutional attempt to discourage an accurate census count.” Others argued that an undercount in regions with high immigrant populations would lead not only to unreliable data but also to unfair redistricting, to the benefit of Republicans. “Adding this question will result in a bad census — deeply flawed population data that will skew public and private sector decisions to ensure equal representation, allocate government resources and anticipate economic growth opportunities — for the next 10 years,” Vanita Gupta, the chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and a deputy attorney general in the Obama administration, said in a statement Monday night. “The stakes are too high to allow this. We urge Congress to overturn this error in judgment.”

Well, I feel fairly safe in assuming that that will never happen, but it’s very possible that Becerra or someone will find judges who can see what’s happening right under their noses. The decision to include the citizenship question enables the Republicans to employ a loophole opened by the Supreme Court in a recent decision whereby individual states to draw their maps based on eligible voters, and not on all residents, which would give the Republican state legislatures of the moment a way to perpetuate themselves. At any rate, it’s another example of the fundamental philosophy of conservative vandalism—ni shagu nazad.

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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