Census plan would hurt California, state officials say
WASHINGTON – The Trump administration’s plan to ask everyone in America whether they are U.S. citizens as part of the 2020 census could cost California billions of dollars and a seat in Congress, state officials warn.
Whether California and other big, urban states that face similar effects can do anything about it remains to be seen. They are rushing to court to challenge the administration’s authority to tack onto the survey a question that hasn’t been tested in decades.
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra warned 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, 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. Sen. Dianne Feinstein called it “designed to depress participation in certain communities” and “an assault on the foundations California is suing the Trump administration over its decision to add a question about citizenship to the 2020 U.S. Census. In announcing the lawsuit Tuesday, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra says adding such a question is a reckless decision that would violate the U.S. Constitution and cause a population undercount.
of this country.”
Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, whose department oversees the census, made the decision despite a warning from six former Census Bureau directors, who served Republicans and Democrats, that the citizenship question could undermine the credibility of the count and discourage participation.
The census, which takes place every 10 years, hasn’t asked every person living in America about citizenship since 1950. That’s in large part because of concern that asking the question would discourage not just noncitizens, but also their families from participating.
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 relatively fewer immigrants than the rest of the nation.
The main purpose of the $12.5-billion census effort is to get an accurate count of population for divvying up House seats among the states. The count also drives how the government distributes money from some of its biggest programs, such as Medicaid.
The Constitution provides for an “actual enumeration” of population every 10 years and provides that “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 citizens and noncitizens, although some conservatives in recent years have challenged that.
California filed its suit immediately.
“The state of California, in particular, stands to lose if the citizenship question is included,” said the complaint filed by Becerra late Monday in federal district court in San Francisco.
“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.