Left-wingers have been throwing an extended temper tantrum across the nation after the Trump administration announced it plans to ask individuals responding to the 2020 U.S. Census if they are American citizens.
Racist. Sexist. Xenophobic. That’s what you are if you dare to believe it is perfectly reasonable in a Census questionnaire to ask respondents if they’re citizens of this country, according to Democrats.
The U.S. Department of Commerce, which administers the decennial, constitutionally required head count, said the surprisingly controversial question will be added to Census forms at the request of the U.S. Department of Justice to help identify possible violations of the Voting Rights Act, something left-wingers claim to care about.
That any sane person would be outraged at this commonsense proposal is a depressing reminder of the power of the leftist, multiculturalist indoctrination that has robbed generations of Americans of the ability to think for themselves. The Left has been trying to blur the lines between citizens and non-citizens for years and it’s clear their hard work has paid off.
Democrat office-holders from blue states could be found shrieking and hyper-ventilating on cable news programs about this supposedly nightmarish assault by President Trump on the rights and self-esteem of illegal aliens and on the left-wingers at groups like National Council of La Raza, ACLU, and NAACP that go to great lengths to help them vote illegally in elections.
These people don’t care about the U.S. Constitution or the rule of law. The only thing they care about is power, and anything that dilutes the power of U.S. citizens in order to privilege foreigners and illegal aliens is a good thing in their eyes.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote on Twitter, “The census must count every person. Our Constitution demands it. Our democracy requires it. @realDonaldTrump is jeopardizing its accuracy by adding an unnecessary citizenship question. I stand with former Census directors from both parties in opposing this terrible decision.”
Warren was promptly corrected by Mike Gonzalez of the Heritage Foundation.
He tweeted in reply:
Jefferson first requested the question in 1800. The Census continuously and without controversy asked a question on citizenship from 1890 to 1950–years when the foreign-born population was higher than today. The ACS continues to ask this question to this day. Stop the hyperbole.
The ACS refers to the American Community Survey, which is conducted by the Census Bureau. According to the agency’s website, the survey “helps local officials, community leaders, and businesses understand the changes taking place in their communities. It is the premier source for detailed population and housing information about our nation.”
The Washington Examiner reports that the Census Bureau has been asking questions similar to the citizenship question on three of its surveys since at least the Obama administration.
What’s more, according to a new analysis, those unwilling to cooperate with the Census due to citizenship and other questions has not increased under President Trump, though they did surge under Obama.
“I cannot find a sudden decrease in the public’s willingness to take part in Census Bureau surveys that already include a citizenship question,” said Steven Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies.
Unrestrained by logic or facts, radical leftist and community organizer Tom Perez, who is now chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said his party would “fight this attempt to undermine our democracy.”
“This is a craven attack on our democracy and a transparent attempt to intimidate immigrant communities,” Perez said in a statement. “The census is a constitutionally-mandated count of all U.S. residents, not a political tool for Donald Trump to push his agenda and disempower Latinos and other people of color.”
Perez spewed post-modernist-sounding drivel, claiming that restoring the citizenship question that the Obama administration took out lets Trump and Republicans stoke “fear” so they can make immigrant communities “invisible.” In reality they are “guaranteeing an inaccurate count that lays the groundwork for sustained racial gerrymandering and jeopardizes critical resources for communities across the country.”
On MSNBC Perez offered a conspiracy theory.
“They want to change it to count the number of U.S. citizens so that they can engage in very not subtle voter suppression,” Perez said. “That is illegal and that is totally inconsistent with what the North Star of the Census in Republican and Democratic administrations have been.”
“This is just another divide-and-conquer effort. This is a first cousin of these voter ID laws sought to make sure that African Americans and Latinos can’t vote,” he said.
The crazed nonsense continued.
After California Attorney General Xavier Becerra (D) brought a lawsuit, New York State’s ambulance-chasing leftist attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman (D), said Tuesday he was launching multi-state litigation to prevent the reintroduction of the citizenship question, even though it had been a mainstay of the Census prior to the Obama era.
Using Orwellian double-speak, Schneiderman claimed the lawsuit was aimed at preserving a “fair and accurate Census.” He attacked the administration as “reckless” for bringing the question back, adding improbably that its inclusion would “create an environment of fear and distrust in immigrant communities that would make impossible both an accurate Census and the fair distribution of federal tax dollars.”
“This move directly targets states like New York that have large, thriving immigrant populations – threatening billions of dollars in federal funding for New York, as well as fair representation in Congress and the Electoral College,” he claimed.
California’s Becerra, who has been at the forefront of defending his state’s unconstitutional sanctuary laws that thuggishly punish people for cooperating with federal immigration enforcement officials, tweeted, “Including the question is not just a bad idea –it is illegal.”
It may be the first time a leftist has opposed an inclusionary policy.
Disgraced and nearly impeached former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder (D) vowed to “litigate to stop the administration from moving forward with this irresponsible decision.”
“The addition of a citizenship question to the census questionnaire is a direct attack on our representative democracy,” the corrupt ex-official said. “This question will lower the response rate and undermine the accuracy of the count, leading to devastating, decade-long impacts on voting rights and the distribution of billions of dollars of federal funding.”
He added: “Make no mistake—this decision is motivated purely by politics.”
The increasingly fragile House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said the move by President Trump was a “dog-whistle tactic to raise funds for his campaign committee.”
“The Census is supposed to count everyone,” whined Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey (D).
Proving she habitually snoozed her way through law school, Healey said, “This is a blatant and illegal attempt by the Trump administration to undermine that goal, which will result in an undercount of the population and threaten federal funding for our state and cities.”
Left-wingers have been trying to hijack the U.S. Census for partisan purposes for years.
The Obama administration tried to use what might be called the brute force approach to compel the Census to do the Democrats’ bidding. The White House wanted to arrogate to itself control over the Census, a move that no doubt would have had huge ramifications for congressional redistricting. After lawmakers such as Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) denounced the plan as a “naked political power grab,” the Obama administration backed down, assuring lawmakers the Census would remain at the Commerce Department.
Before that, when Bill Clinton was president, left-wingers tried to use statistical voodoo to inflate the count in their big-city strongholds, but they were slapped down by the courts. This kind of statistical modeling or sampling is controversial because it is flagrantly unconstitutional and because it opens the counting process to political manipulation.
The Supreme Court ruled in U.S. Department of Commerce v. U.S. House of Representatives (1999) that using statistical sampling methods for congressional redistricting purposes was not permissible.
The court opinion noted that Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution states that “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective Numbers,” and that “the actual Enumeration” shall take place “within every subsequent Term of ten Years.”
The Fourteenth Amendment states that “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.”
Despite their side’s loss in the high court, a month after President George W. Bush was inaugurated, Los Angeles, San Antonio, Stamford, Conn., and other localities filed a federal lawsuit in hopes of forcing the new administration to use sampling in the next Census. Presumably they viewed the 1999 ruling as applying only to the 2000 Census.
The new state lawsuits against the citizenship question are part of the Left’s long-running war against America’s free institutions.
No doubt more such legal proceedings are coming.