End of theatrics
Citizenship question drama played to Trump crowd’s love of showy displays, big talk.
Let’s hope today’s announcement by President Trump that he has given up adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census has ended this tiresome soap opera.
Doing his best to gloss over defeat, Trump said the Commerce Department would use even better methods to get what he wants.
Trump didn’t explain exactly what it is he wants — probably because it keeps changing.
Even the conservative-leaning U.S. Supreme Court saw through Trump’s scheme. It ruled two weeks ago that the sole reason the administration gave for wanting to ask about citizenship — ostensibly, to protect minority voters covered under the Voting Rights Act — was a lie. Evidence presented to the court showed Trump’s true goal, which he later admitted, was “to find out if somebody is a citizen as opposed to an illegal.”
The court said the Voting Rights rationale was adopted too “late in the process” to believe. The ruling left the door open for an administration at some point to come up with a legitimate reason for the citizenship query, but when Trump’s folks couldn’t do that the Justice Department announced it was dropping the case and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said that the 2020 census forms were being printed without the question.
Apparently, the presses kept rolling even as Trump hemmed and hawed about his next step.
It’s hard to believe the Justice Department and Ross didn’t tell Trump beforehand what they were doing. Just as it’s hard to believe the military didn’t give the president a projected casualty count before he ordered a missile strike on Iran and then called it off last minute after he says he found out 150 people might die.
So, it was a surprise last week when Trump tweeted, after his own appointee’s announcement, that he hadn’t abandoned his census fight after all, and that any news reporting so was fake. “We are absolutely moving forward, as we must, because of the importance of the answer to this question,” Trump said.
In typical Trump fashion, he also felt the need to fire someone. He announced he was replacing the Justice Department team handling the case, but one of the lower court judges also hearing arguments said the administration had provided no “satisfactory reasons for the substitution of counsel” and denied the request.
That denial virtually killed the likelihood of a different legal strategy being developed despite assurances Monday by Attorney General William Barr that one would be found. Barr didn’t back down from that assertion during Thursday’s news conference, but he said Trump was right to end the court fight to ensure the census began on time.
Trump was more defiant about the need to know who is a citizen, but his bluster was just more political theater unconnected to the need to fulfill a federal duty this country has successfully completed at the end of each decade since 1790. Never in that 230 years has the census been delayed. Yet, Trump threatened to do that.
It turns out that the June 30 deadline to begin printing the questionnaires was set by the administration to get the case fasttracked to the Supreme Court for a ruling Trump hoped would be in his favor. When the court ruled against him, Trump said he wanted the census delayed until the citizenship question is on the form.
The president chose a poor tool if he thought the census could help him find people in this country illegally. People who answer “no” about whether they have citizenship aren’t necessarily here illegally. They could have green cards or other visas.
More important, by law any information collected by the Census Bureau must be used for statistical purposes only. It can’t be given to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to make arrests.
That didn’t keep Trump from using the threat of a citizenship question to fire up the anti-immigrant faction in his voter base. His grandstanding may not have gotten the question on the 2020 census forms, but it could lower participation in the census. The whole ordeal has made even families here legally fearful that their participation will prompt an ICE visit.
The last time the Census Bureau asked about citizenship was in 1950. It discarded the question because it interfered with the agency’s ability to carry out its constitutionally mandated job to count how many people are in the United States, citizens or not.
Texas and other states with large immigrant populations can’t afford inaccurate counts, which could lead to states being shortchanged their portion of $600 billion in federal funds and of congressional representation. Texans want their fair share of federal tax dollars and political power.
And we’re more likely to get it now that Trump has given up his politically inspired quest to include a citizenship question on the census questionnaire. It’s either hubris, incompetence or sheer malice that it took the president this long to choose a less disruptive path, which available to him from the very beginning.