Moody, DeSantis put politics first, Florida last over census question
Stymied by time and by judges who saw through the pretext, President Trump was prudent to give up on sabotaging the 2020 Census with a citizenship question that would have frightened millions of immigrants into avoiding the count.
But that doesn’t moot two serious questions Floridians should still be asking:
1. Why was their attorney general, Ashley Moody, eager to help Trump despite a serious risk to the state’s share of federal funds and to its voting strength in Congress?
2. Why does Gov. Ron DeSantis refuse flatly to encourage Floridians to be counted?
The short answer: Both have put Republican Party politics above the interests of their state. An undercount of immigrants would help GOP-controlled legislatures gerrymander against the urban areas where many Hispanic immigrants live.
Data from the Census, which the Constitution requires to count “the whole number of persons” in each state, is the basis for drawing Congressional and state legislative districts as well as establishing how many seats U.S. House seats and electoral college votes each state will have.
The computer files of a deceased Republican consultant, Thomas Hofeller, laid bare the gerrymandering intent. He had written that citizenship data would be “advantageous to Republicans and nonHispanic whites” and drafted an early version of what became the Commerce Department’s request to include the question on all Census forms.
That evidence, found by his estranged daughter, Stephanie Hofeller, who gave it to Common Cause, emerged after two federal district courts had ruled against the administration and before the Supreme Court issued its 5-4 decision that rejected the Commerce Department’s justification as “pretextual”— in other words, made up.
It didn’t take a smoking gun, though, to understand how the question, “Is this person a citizen?” would intimidate Hispanic immigrants, even those with the proper papers, for fear of a government that’s openly hostile to them. Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion acknowledged that reality.
Moody certainly was aware of it when she joined 15 other Republican attorneys general and governors in filing a friend of the court brief supporting the administration’s appeal to the Supreme Court. It was one of 52 briefs from outside parties, an unusually high volume signifying what was at stake.
Among them, five former Census directors cited the Census Bureau’s “long held view, based on prior experience and studies … that the inclusion of such a question will significantly reduce the all-important self-response rate and is likely to reduce the census’s accuracy.”
The brief Moody helped prepare adopted the administration’s argument that citizenship data is needed to enforce the Voting Rights Act. Her spokeswoman echoed that in a statement last week.
That calls for cynical laughter. No provision in the Voting Rights Act depends on identifying non-citizens. No recent Republican administration in either Washington or Tallahassee has shown any interest in the Voting Rights Act other than to look for ways to ignore or evade it. The Leadership Committee for Civil Rights declared in its brief that the question would “undermine” rather than enhance voting rights enforcement.
The Census Bureau does run another survey, though to only 1 in 38 households, that asks about citizenship. It indicates that one in every 11 Floridians is a noncitizen. If nearly 6 percent of them shunned the full census, as the Bureau’s professionals estimated, some 100,000 Floridians would not be counted.
With seats in the House of Representatives fixed at 435, every state is in competition for its share. Florida has 27. An undercount could cost the state one or two of the new seats it expects to gain from the 2020 Census, as well as depress its quotas of federal money for schools, roads, housing subsidies, food stamps, children’s health insurance, Head Start, and nutrition for mothers and infants.
With so much at stake, it’s not just Moody’s attitude that’s appalling and indefensible. DeSantis’s disinterest is all the more conspicuous because James Uthmeier, his deputy general counsel, used to be a senior advisor to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross.
He refused to answer some questions about the citizenship question dispute in an interview earlier this month with the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee. The governor’s office said Uthmeier was following instructions from Commerce Department lawyers.
And last month, DeSantis flatly refused requests by Democratic legislators to establish a statewide committee to encourage Floridians to respond to the Census.
“The federal government does that. We don’t have a role in it,” he said. “They administer it, and they should administer it how they see fit.”
Nobody was asking him to help administer it — only to help Florida turn in a full count and earn its fair share of federal funds and seats in Congress.
Unfortunately, even with the administration giving up its fight, Florida’s foreignborn residents may be wary about sharing information with the Census given the divisive debate. If so, Moody and DeSantis will share in the blame for fewer Floridians getting counted.