Supreme Court to decide on Census citizenship question after lower court ruled Trump team lied

On Tuesday the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case contesting the Trump administration's push to add a citizenship question to the 2020 national census. This is itself alarming: the constitutional intent of the census, the repeated dire warnings by career census staff, and the flagrant manner in which Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross lied outright about his actions would seem to make the case clear-cut. The Supreme Court will essentially be deciding whether or not all of that evidence should be tossed in favor of the alternative Trump administration hypothesis: We can do what we want, so shut up.

The core of the argument centers around Team Trump's behavior in pushing for the new citizenship question. A lower court blasted Ross for purposefully lying when he claimed that the Justice Department requested that the question be added; it was actually Ross who went to the Justice Department fishing for a pretext to add it. And it matters because census experts are uniform in their warnings that including the question will suppress the response rates of minority, and especially Latino, census respondents. There is a perception that the responses to that question would be shared, despite current prohibitions against doing so, with law enforcement in an effort to target undocumented U.S. residents for deportation. That means counties with larger populations of undocumented residents could see their "official" census-set populations significantly undercounted; that, in turn, means reduced federal spending to those counties. The number of people actually living there doesn't change, but the funding—and even more critically, representation in the House of Representatives—does.

And that potential undercount, according to researchers, could be "huge."

Nationally, only 35 percent of immigrants and 31 percent of Latinos trusted the Trump administration to protect this information and not share it with other federal agencies — an issue that has already arisen in debates about the citizenship question. Trust in the Trump administration was even lower in California and San Jose.

It seems fairly clear from Ross’ misdirections that this selective—but potentially severe—undercounting was the whole point on the part of the virulently anti-immigrant administration.

from Daily Kos http://bit.ly/2vjprTb