High Court weighs census citizenship question
Officials: Areas like South Texas could see undercounting
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court meets behind closed doors Friday to weigh a question that could shape the political power of California for the decade ahead.
At issue is the Trump administration’s plan to ask all households for the first time since 1950 whether occupants are U.S. citizens.
State officials and Latino activists have been sounding the alarm, arguing that this single change to next year’s census could have a broad and unforeseen impact.
If the Trump White House wanted to deal a political blow to California, “the most effective way to do it would be to promote an intentional undercount of the state in the 2020 census,” said Arturo Vargas, chief executive of the National Association of Elected and Appointed Latino Officials in Los Angeles. “And I think that’s precisely what’s behind the adding of this question.”
The once-a-decade count will be used to divide up political power among the states and within states, and political scientists predicted in court testimony that California would lose billions in federal funds and at least one and possibly as many as three seats in the House — and the same number of electoral votes — if the citizenship question is used next year.
California would be hit especially hard, they said, because 28 percent of the state’s households have a family member who is not a citizen.
Over the advice of census experts, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced last year he would add the citizenship question in order, he said, to “provide complete and accurate data” for the census.
For each person, the head of household will be asked, “Is this person a citizen of the United States?” The answer comes in one of five boxes to be checked: (1) “Yes, born in the United States”; (2) “Yes, born in Puerto Rico, Guam, U.S. Virgin Islands or Northern Marianas”; (3) “Yes, born abroad to U.S. citizen parent or parents”; (4) “Yes, U.S. citizen by naturalization — Print year of naturalization”; or (5) “No. Not a U.S. citizen.”
When pressed to justify the decision, Ross said he chose to add the extra question because the Justice Department said it needed the citizenship data to comply with the Voting Rights Act.
Officials in California, New York and 17 other Democratic-leaning states say neither justification makes sense. They argue that adding the citizenship question is likely to yield incomplete and inaccurate data because millions of immigrant families will refuse to respond, leading to a severe undercount in areas like Southern California and South Texas. And they said Justice Department lawyers have enforced the Voting Rights Act for more than 50 years without needing block-byblock data on eligible voters. Instead, they have relied on data from the American Community Survey, which annually asks detailed questions, including on race, ethnicity and citizenship, of a small statistical sample of the public.
On Friday, lawyers for California and the Justice Department will present their final arguments in San Francisco in the state’s suit, California vs. Ross, that seeks to block the change. At the same time, the Supreme Court justices will meet privately to weigh the administration’s request to decide the issue on a fast track in the case from New York.
Solicitor Gen. Noel Francisco said the high court must act now because the Census Bureau needs to begin printing forms by summer.
If the justices agree to hear the case, Department of Commerce vs. New York, they will bypass the appellate courts and schedule a special argument in late April or May. They will review a scalding 277-page opinion handed down last month by U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman in New York who stopped just short of accusing Ross of lying to hide his partisan motives. He detailed how the commerce secretary had overruled the government’s statisticians and demographers who had spent a decade preparing for the census and had warned it was a mistake to add such a charged and untested question.
The Constitution calls for an “actual enumeration” of the 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.” This has been understood to mean that all residents are counted equally in the census, regardless of their citizenship status.