The Supreme Court and the Eleventh-Hour Citizenship Question: What to Look Out For
Debunking the falsehoods you can expect to hear from the people behind this disinformation campaign.
By Beth Lynk
The late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said 12 words that should resonate with everyone in a democracy: “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.” Facts are the basis of sound decisions. But today, opinions that are far from factual are driving and distorting the debate on the very question of how our government gets its facts every 10 years — the constitutionally mandated census.
The Leadership Conference Education Fund is part of a coalition of nonpartisan, nonprofit organizations that have decades of experience working to ensure a fair and accurate census. No matter who is in the White House or which party controls Congress, we care that policymakers make decisions with accurate, apolitical information. From the allotment of more than $800 billion in federal funding that supports services and resources like community health centers and safe roads, to the apportionment of congressional districts, key decisions affecting all of us depend on a fair and accurate census.
Now some, relying on a series of fictions, are trying to weaponize the census for their own political purposes by including a citizenship question that will suppress the count in 2020. The Leadership Conference Education Fund and many others have protested this decision, but the Trump administration has continued to advocate for the addition of a last-minute citizenship question to the 2020 Census. This may be the issue you haven’t heard about that may determine the outcome of everything you care about.
We only have one chance in a decade to get the census right.
Next week, on Tuesday, April 23, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral argument on whether the addition of a new, untested citizenship question will be on the 2020 Census. To arm all those invested in a healthy democracy with the facts, we’re debunking the falsehoods you can expect to hear from the people behind this disinformation campaign.
First, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross pretends that the U.S. Census Bureau, which administers the census and is part of his agency, has always asked for the citizenship status of everyone in the United States. This is false. As scholars of the census have told the Supreme Court in their amicus brief, “never in the census’s 230-year history has the government asked for the citizenship status of everyone in the country…Rather, throughout history, the government has asked only a subset of the population to provide citizenship information.”
That’s because the Census Bureau itself consistently concluded that asking the question of everyone would produce a less reliable and accurate count. The bureau’s own research indicates that the question would prevent 6.5 million people from participating in 2020. And that’s why five former U.S. Census Bureau Directors who served under both Democratic and Republican administrations filed an amicus brief in this case, warning of the danger of including the question on the 2020 Census.
Second, the Trump administration insists that the citizenship question is necessary to ensure enforcement of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). Also, not true. As three federal courts have now found, this rationale is a misleading excuse. There is no factual basis to support the position that collecting citizenship data from the decennial census is needed for VRA enforcement. Nor, until the events triggering this case, had the Justice Department ever asked the Census Bureau to add such a citizenship question. And because census citizenship data would be less accurate and less complete than existing citizenship data, collecting such data would severely undermine VRA enforcement — thereby accomplishing the opposite of Secretary Ross’ stated purpose.
Finally, the administration is trying to claim that what it’s trying to do is noncontroversial — really, business as usual. Are you detecting a pattern? This is most definitely not business as usual. What we now know through the lawsuits seeking to overturn Secretary Ross’ decision is that he actively searched around for an agency to make the request to add the citizenship question. The Department of Justice finally did it (with a shove from then Attorney General Jeff Sessions), despite initial reluctance to make the request and against the advice of senior career experts at the Census Bureau. This was a well-concealed effort by Secretary Ross and his allies, which was only uncovered because of the multiple lawsuits challenging the decision. As one lower court judge noted, “the court can and does infer from the various ways in which Secretary Ross and his aides acted — like people with something to hide — that they did have something to hide.”
And no wonder. As noted above, the Census Bureau long ago concluded that citizenship questions were problematic and posed huge risks to having a fair and accurate census. The opposition to the addition of the citizenship question on the 2020 Census has been overwhelming and has included voices from both parties, as well as states and localities, professional scientific associations and former Census Directors, civil rights and community-based organizations, former Justice Department officials, businesses, the philanthropic community, and more. The public comments that the Commerce Department received regarding Secretary Ross’ decision reflect the broad understanding of the negative impact the citizenship question would have on census accuracy and fairness. In fact, 99.1 percent of the nearly 150,000 comments received opposed the addition of the citizenship question. And three dozen amicus (friend-of-the-court) briefs have been filed with the Supreme Court in support of the citizenship question challenge, which, together, paint a powerful picture of just how deeply the adverse effects of a citizenship question on the 2020 Census would cut.
The census is our nation’s largest, most complex peacetime undertaking and is a cornerstone of our democracy. Secretary Ross, President Trump, and their defenders are betting that by disrupting the census, they can change who counts on the biggest decisions of all. We can’t let this happen. We must all defend the facts in 2019 to safeguard an accurate and inclusive census in 2020.
Beth Lynk is the Census Counts campaign director at The Leadership Conference Education Fund.
