An assault on our elections
When the U.S. Supreme Court saw through President Donald Trump’s attempts to tamper with the 2020 federal census — and his administration’s outright lie about it — one would have thought that would be the end of the matter. Is wasn’t.
Mr. Trump is back, abusing the power of his office to try to rig the constitutionally mandated count for at least his shortterm political gain, if not also a long-term goal of tipping the congressional scales in favor of his Republican Party.
As bad as this is — as fundamentally unfaithful as it is to the Constitution — it’s even worse in the broader context of Mr. Trump’s attempts to damage one underpinning of our democratic system after another. To corrupt the census is ultimately to corrupt our elections and threaten Americans’ faith in their system of representative government.
This is part of a pattern that goes back to the 2016 election, which Candidate Trump decried as rigged and whose results he said he might not accept — unless, of course, he won. Which he did, losing the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes but claiming enough votes in the Electoral College to clinch the race.
Now he’s at it again, saying that he won’t necessarily accept the results of this year’s election, either. Little wonder: He’s running behind Democrat Joe Biden in national polls as well as in nearly every swing state. So he’s trying to gain advantages where he can, no matter how destructively or dishonestly.
He’s still talking about widespread voter fraud, a claim with no basis in any evidence he has ever produced, despite his appointment of a commission to prove it — a panel that came up with nothing. But Mr. Trump is still at it, railing about mail-in balloting, a process the U.S. must widely employ this year to avoid turning polling places into coronavirus incubators on Election Day. Mr. Trump and some Republicans worry that enabling more people to easily vote will give Democrats a numerical advantage. So the president, an absentee voter himself, is trying to prevent widespread use of the convenience he enjoys by claiming it’s corrupt.
And now he has zeroed in on the census, declaring that he has the authority to decide who is and who isn’t a “person” in the context of the constitutional mandate to count, every 10 years, the “persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.” So undocumented immigrants, he says, won’t be counted — an interpretation of the Constitution seeming to require not viewing them as “persons.”
It’s worth recalling how we got here, and how Mr. Trump has employed policies that echo from this nation’s racist past to attack, dehumanize and marginalize immigrants. He tried to put a citizenship question on the census in an attempt to scare immigrants, legal or not, from filling it out. Now, after a conservative Supreme Court rebuffed his administration’s contrivance that this was just to protect voting rights, he has this new strategy. It is as insidious as declaring a slave three-fifths of a person, as our Constitution originally did — in this case turning an estimated 11 million people living and working in this country into non-persons by presidential decree.
America’s founders created the census for one reason: to accurately count every person in the country to ensure fair representation in Congress. To tamper with that is one more way to tamper with our elections, and destroy Americans’ faith in their fairness and in the integrity of our system of government. When Mr. Trump talks about our elections being rigged, it’s not his fear. It’s his plan.