Two political cheating scandals in 48 hours
Cheating isn’t winning. We try to teach this to our children, but politics provides the opposite lesson.
Political cheating allows those who engage in it to amass far more power than they have a right to in a constitutional democracy. Its most sophisticated form isn’t ballot-box stuffing but the use of indirect means by those in authority to perpetuate themselves in office.
Within 48 hours, Americans were offered two fast courses in the politics of cheating.
Late Monday, the Trump administration — against the advice of six previous Census Bureau directors, Republicans and Democrats alike — moved to add to the 2020 census a query about a respondent’s citizenship status.
And on Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard a case that turns on whether Maryland’s gerrymandered district boundaries deprive Republicans of fair representation in Congress.
In both cases, the courts should act to defend our republican democracy. Congress could also remedy the census controversy. But most Republicans are likely quite happy with the distortions the citizenship question could introduce.
The formal census has not asked about citizenship since 1950, and it’s an especially bad idea to reintroduce it now.
Census response rates in lower-income neighborhoods are always a challenge, and immigrants in the country illegally worry that answering the questionnaire could endanger their status, despite le- gal guarantees of confidentiality. Even legal immigrants share these worries.
Concerns have increased exponentially with President Trump targeting undocumented immigrants.
Undercounting immigrants tilts representation in government away from places with large immigrant populations (often Democratic-leaning) and overrepresent white, rural regions and states. And it shortchanges undercounted areas for federal funding.
The maneuver is all the more problematic because Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross chose to include the request for information on citizenship in the face of objections from career Census Bureau officials. The lateness of his decision means the citizenship question will not be subjected to the bureau’s usual extensive testing for the effect of new inquiries on the accuracy of the overall count.
This is the contention of California Attorney General Xavier Becerra’s lawsuit. He said Ross’ decision was “arbitrary and capricious.” He’s right. At least 11 other states also are trying to block the move.
Gerrymandering is political cheating at its purest, drawing district lines to maximize your party’s representation in legislative bodies and minimize the number of seats your opponents can win.
Many of the state legislatures that drew district lines after the 2010 census were GOP-controlled, so opposing gerrymandering now is seen as a partisan, Democratic issue.
But it’s not. The addition of the Maryland case (where a formerly Republican district was chopped up and redistributed in a way that reduced the GOP seats) to a docket that already includes a challenge to an outlandish GOP gerrymander in Wisconsin is a reminder that both parties can suffer from this practice.
Linking Maryland and Wisconsin could allow the Supreme Court to rule against gerrymandering in a thoroughly nonpartisan way. And the Wisconsin litigants provided an objective formula for judging when district lines are plainly unfair.
Attacks on judicial activism are a staple on the right. The increasingly aggressive activism of conservative judges has made this a live concern on the left as well. But when elected officials use their power to make it ever harder for their opponents to win elections — exactly what’s happening with the census and gerrymandering — the courts have an obligation to serve as democracy’s last line of defense.