Citizenship is becoming an
ever bigger political issue. After some years of heated arguments about undocumented
immigrants and whether they ought to be allowed to become citizens, a new front
in the citizenship war has broken out over the census. The Trump administration
wants to include the following question on the 2020 census form: “Is this
person a citizen of the United States?” Possible
answers include: born in the US, born abroad of US parents, naturalized
citizen, and “not a US citizen”.
It certainly is useful to
have accurate data on the citizenship status of our population. But political
calculation lurks behind this question, based on the following chain of
reasoning. In the midst of a Republican campaign against immigrants and
immigration, a citizenship question might frighten immigrants, both legal and
not, from responding to the census, thus lowering total population counts. The
census results are used to apportion Congressional seats and Electoral College
votes, including everyone counted, whether citizen, legal or unauthorized
resident. Many federal spending programs distribute funds to states based on
population. Places with large numbers of immigrants tend to be
Democratic-leaning big cities, so there could be long-range political power implications
if the count is skewed. Counting citizens and non-citizens connects to counting
votes, the most important constitutional issue of our time.
The biggest impact could be
in Democratic California, one of Trump’s most persistent adversaries: 27% of
Californians are immigrants and 34% of adults are Latino. Studies have already
shown that Latinos were undercounted in the 2010 census and non-Hispanic whites
were overcounted, according
to the Census Bureau itself. The amount of federal funds that California
could lose if a citizenship question causes even larger undercounting could
reach billions of dollars.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur
Ross, Steve Bannon (then a white House advisor), Kris Kobach (then Kansas
Secretary of State), and others decided in early 2018 to put in the citizenship
question, last asked in the 1950 census. Ross claimed the impetus came from a
concern in the Department of Justice about protecting voting rights, but
journalists uncovered an email trail proving he lied. The chief data scientist
of the Census Bureau, John Abowd, opposed
the addition of a citizenship question, which he said “is very costly” and “harms
the quality of the census count”, and would result in “substantially less
accurate citizenship status data than are available” from existing government
records.
Nevertheless, Ross decided to
include the question. Democratic attorneys general for 17 states, the District
of Columbia, and many cities and counties have mounted a legal
challenge in federal courts across the country. Judges in three federal
courts in California, New York, and Maryland have already ruled that there
should be no citizenship question. One judge described the argument by Commerce
Secretary Ross as “an effort to concoct a rationale bearing no
plausible relation to the real reason.” Another judge called the Republican
case a “veritable smorgasbord of classic, clear-cut” violations of the
Administrative Procedures Act, a 73-year-old law which makes the simple demands
that decisions by federal agencies must be grounded in reality and make logical
sense.
The Supreme Court has agreed
to take the case on an expedited basis. So the census absorbs considerable
political weight and becomes itself a
constitutional issue, pitting Democrats and Republicans on the stage of the
Supreme Court. A lawyer for the Democratic-controlled US House of
Representatives will be one of the four attorneys arguing against the citizenship
question. He will repeat the political power argument on which the local
Democratic authorities based their case: they have standing to sue, because
they would lose House seats and federal funds due to deliberately skewed
results.
The pure political
weight of each seat on the Supreme Court has never been made so clear as in
the past three years, where one seat in 2016 became the prize in a naked
display of Republican Senatorial political power: we can do this, so we will. Now
5 Republican-appointed justices and 4 Democratic-appointed justices will
decide the case. The decision will soon have consequences, when the 2020
Census results are used to allocate state and federal representation by
Republican and Democratic legislatures for the next election, and even before
that, to allocate federal dollars.
If you are interested in a
fuller discussion of the significance of this case, go to the website of the
National Constitution Center:
https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/the-constitution-and-the-supreme-court-census-case.
It is rare to find a
detailed, logical, clear and unbiased description of the facts on such a
politically charged issue.
While technical legal issues
determine who is a citizen, each party has been proclaiming their version of a
good citizen. Republicans have been clear about their version of how a good
citizen should act. Hate the free press, because they only tell lies.
Physically attacking journalists is okay for a Republican citizen, and
elected Republicans will defend your
right to do that. The government elected by the citizens is evil, not a democratic
institution, but one run by an unelected hidden “deep state”. Nothing is wrong
with manipulating the tax system, because taxes are bad, the government wastes
the money it collects, and the IRS is an ideological ally of the deep state,
anyway. Citizens not only have the constitutional right to resist an oppressive
government, but a good citizen treats our federal government as oppressive, and
ought to resist it now, with the exception of everything the current President
does.
It’s not necessary to be a
violent white supremacist to be a good Republican citizen, but that’s not a
disqualification. Disqualifications have to do with paperwork, with color, with
where one was born, and with ideological viewpoints. Liberals are traitors to
America, the worst kind of a citizen. People who believe in the right of a
pregnant woman to control her own body are murderers, still citizens, but
belonging in jail. Various other crimes of the mind disqualify Americans as
good Republican citizens: advocating gun control, believing in climate change,
and demanding that we protect the endangered environment.
Democrats need to tell
Americans how we think about citizenship, not just the paperwork and the
legalities, but the ethics and good behavior. I think a good American citizen:
1) Prizes the diversity of
viewpoints that an ethnically and religiously diverse society produces;
2) Believes in the power of
government to make people’s lives better;
3) Believes that government
should act in the interests of all citizens, especially those who have the
least resources;
4) Wants the government to
protect the rights of minorities;
5) Believes that personal
religion should be a free choice, but that the religious beliefs of no
particular group should determine government policy.
If that is not a winning
argument about what it means to be an American, then there will be no progress
toward creating an equal and just democracy.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
May 14, 2019
No comments:
Post a Comment