The Mexican American Legislative Caucus and the Texas Senate Hispanic Caucus are suing the Trump administration in hopes of blocking the addition of a citizenship question to the once-a-decade census of every person living in the United States.
In a lawsuit filed Thursday in a Maryland-based federal court, the Texas-based groups allege that the addition of the controversial question is unconstitutional because it will lead to a disproportionate undercount of Latino and Asian residents, non-citizens and their family members.
That undercount would endanger billions of dollars tied to social services funding and deprive those individuals of equal representation in the U.S. House and during the redrawing of political boundaries that follows each census count, the plaintiffs allege.
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The lawsuit was filed on behalf of more than a dozen plaintiffs — including several Texas-based nonprofits that advocate for Latino residents and legislative Latino caucuses out of Arizona, Maryland and California — who say they are seeking to “preserve the integrity” of the census count.
The Trump administration’s “inclusion of a citizenship question in the 2020 decennial Census is arbitrary and capricious, an abuse of discretion, and otherwise not in accordance with law,” the plaintiffs wrote in their filing.
They specifically allege that the inclusion of the citizenship question violates the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause because it is “motivated by racial animus” toward Latinos, Asians, non-citizens and immigrants. They also argue that the court should act to prevent the undercount that would result from the addition of the question, which would amount to a violation of the Enumerations and Apportionment Clauses.
A coalition of cities and states had previously filed a lawsuit for the same reasons. It can’t hurt to get more irons in the fire on this, given the stakes and the fact that our morally bankrupt Attorney General has no interest in opposing this harmful idea. Given the timing, we’re going to need to start seeing some rulings soon for any of this to matter. I’ll keep an eye out.
I have a different take on inclusion of the citizenship question in the census. Knowing these data is valuable to those charged with the legal duty of redistricting in accordance with the Voting Rights Act requirements of equal opportunity to allow Latino and Asian communities to elect a candidate of choice. Too often we create districts which one group or another claims is required, and one result is that while in a presidential year about 280,000 voters will decide who replaces Ted Poe in congressional district 2, only 132,000 will decide who replaces Gene Green in district 29, or in a gubernatorial year the figures would be about 152,000 voting in CD 2 to select a congress member, and about 58,000 voting in CD 29.
I often wonder how states that have less people than the City of Houston, get two senators. Those states is where one is mostly likely to find the racists and bigots who voted for the Russian cheeto traitor.
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/usa/states/population.shtml
I don’t give a shit what questions the US Govt asks me a on census form – if I don’t like the question, I don’t answer the question. Problem solved.