Documents show that Trump is planning on using the census citizenship question to reshape the electorate to the Republican Party’s advantage.
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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.
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Mr. Hofeller’s exhaustive analysis of Texas state legislative districts concluded that such maps “would be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites,†and would dilute the political power of the state’s Hispanics.
The reason, he wrote, was that the maps would exclude traditionally Democratic Hispanics and their children from the population count. That would force Democratic districts to expand to meet the Constitution’s one person, one vote requirement. In turn, that would translate into fewer districts in traditionally Democratic areas, and a new opportunity for Republican mapmakers to create even stronger gerrymanders.
The citizenship question on the census has nothing to do with protecting voting rights as the Trump administration argued before the Supreme Court. The point is to weaken Democratic districts and all more Republican gerrymandering. Republicans are looking to build a House majority that can never be beaten. It is expected that the Supreme Court is going rule in favor of the Trump administration on the citizenship question. The citizenship question has nothing to do with voting rights.
The citizenship question is all about rigging future elections so that the unpopular Republican Party will win, even when they lose.
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Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
