Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States ... according to their respective Numbers… The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years. From Article 1, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution
For a political party (the GOP) dominated and determined primarily by white Christian traditionalists with strong rural values, a cohort that is shrinking as a percentage of an increasingly diversified population, losing out in Census numbers necessarily means a proportionate reduction in political clout… and hard cash. House districts are completely a function of Census results. And as we have seen in recent years, Republican-majority legislatures have resorted to voter restrictions, placing polling places far from minority residential clusters and a fairly outrageous pattern of gerrymandering to minimize minority voting and maximize the impact of their traditional constituency.
Obviously, the last thing the GOP wants to see is a fair, complete and neutral Census in 2020. There is an overwhelming amount of academic demographic research that tells us that the traditionalists are a shrinking minority in what has already become a primarily diverse nation of “a majority of minorities.” Diversity will continue to trump (sorry) traditionalism. Fortunately for the GOP, reaching a significant number of those minorities is much more difficult than accessing more settled and established constituencies. That much of the upcoming Census will be conducted online clearly favors people with computers and email addresses.
“Disadvantaged minorities are statistically more likely to be undercounted. For example, the Census Bureau estimates that in 1970 over six percent of blacks went uncounted, whereas only around two percent of whites went uncounted. Democrats often argue that modern sampling techniques should be used so that more accurate and complete data can be inferred. Republicans often argue against such sampling techniques, stating the U.S. Constitution requires an ‘actual enumeration’ for apportionment of House seats, and that political appointees would be tempted to manipulate the sampling formulas.” Wikipedia. Much of this minority outreach can only be accomplished with “shoes on the ground,” Census-takers going door-to-door. And that takes money to hire such temporary workers. But those additional outreach constituents are the cohort least likely to support the Republican Party. Guess what that reality has created.
As pointed out in my January 25th blog, GOP Public Enemy No 2 – The Census, the Trump administration (which appoints the head of the Census Bureau) has under-funded the bureau and has limited how far the bureau can go to reach into minority communities. But now they have added one more variable to the mix, one that carries a hidden threat to minority communities. The Trump administration has announced that “citizenship” will be a required question on the next Census.
“Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, whose department oversees the census, made the decision despite a warning from six former Census Bureau directors, representing both Republican and Democratic administrations, that the citizenship question could undermine the credibility of the count and discourage participation.” Los Angeles Times, March 28th. That question was last part of the Census as recently as 68 years ago, long before diversity was even a consideration.
As ICE has stepped up deportation efforts, there is fear in many minority communities – even where the residents are U.S. citizens (some with undocumented relatives) – of further government intrusion. Even though the Census information is legally mandated to be confidential as to individual information – the numbers can only be used in anonymous statistical aggregation – these communities simply do not trust the Trump-directed, clearly anti-immigrant, federal government. At a time when such minority numbers are critical, when the Census Bureau’s reach is already being curtailed, this little question becomes a major deterrent to many minorities’ willingness to participate in the mandatory survey.
States with massive numbers of minorities – mostly states with large urban concentrations – face the possibility of losing billions of current levels federal funding if those minorities can simply be erased from Census results. Rural states stand to benefit from a natural reallocation of such funding to their populations, who will be the cohorts most likely to be recorded. One state – California, a favorite target of the Trump administration – is taking action against this change to the Census that could cost that state billions and billions of federal dollars.
“California filed its lawsuit immediately… ‘The state of California, in particular, stands to lose if the citizenship question is included,’ said the complaint filed [March 26th] in federal district court in San Francisco… The suit continued: ‘Undercounting the sizable number of Californian noncitizens and their citizen relatives will imperil the state’s fair share of congressional seats and Electoral College electors and will cost the state billions of dollars in federal funding over the next decade… It is long settled that all persons residing in the United States — citizens and noncitizens alike — must be counted to fulfill the Constitution’s ‘actual Enumeration’ mandate,’ the complaint said…
“California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra warned that the addition of the question ‘could translate into several million people not being counted.’ Legal scholars say California and its allies face a tough fight.
“The decision to add a single question on the census, which the administration announced late Monday night [3/26], may seem an obscure matter, but it could give the Trump administration another lever to shift power and federal resources away from blue states toward red ones, much as happened with the recent tax law changes that disproportionately favored voters in Republican regions.
“The move was met with anger and protest from Democratic lawmakers and civil rights groups. California Sen. Dianne Feinstein called it ‘designed to depress participation in certain communities’ and ‘an assault on the foundations of this country.’…
“The result of adding the question could be a significant undercount of the population in states with large numbers of immigrants, such as California. Most of those states have Democratic majorities. Although some Republican states, such as Texas, have large immigrant populations and could be hurt by an undercount, most majority-Republican states have few immigrants compared with the rest of the nation.
“The main purpose of the $12.5-billion census effort is to get an accurate population count for divvying up House seats among the states. The count also drives how the federal government distributes money from some of its biggest programs, such as Medicaid.
“The Constitution calls for an ‘actual enumeration’ of population every 10 years and says, ‘Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state.’… That clause has been interpreted throughout U.S. history as referring to a state’s entire population, including both citizens and noncitizens, although some conservatives have challenged that in recent years.” LA Times.
Given the conservative tilt of the U.S. Supreme Court, California and other such heavily-urban states face a difficult burden to get this question eliminated, but if that wording is not changed, the U.S. Census will have failed to implement its constitutional mandate to the delight of Republicans who will continue to govern this nation as an increasingly minority party, lording it over an under-represented minority.
I’m Peter Dekom, and who would have predicted that the political party that fought the Civil War in significant part to eliminate slavery would fight equally hard to undermine representational democracy?
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