Roll Call: Census question may be dead, but Trump's backup plan could still reshape political map
Washington,
July 23, 2019
The Census Bureau estimates that some congressional districts, including the downtown Los Angeles district represented by freshman Democrat Jimmy Gomez, have 180,000 or more noncitizens. The constitutionality of such a rejiggered redistricting method hasn’t been definitively settled. But Trump’s insistence on collecting citizenship information makes it look more certain that at least one state will try it in 2021, setting the stage for the next legal battleground in the ongoing fight over how the nation is carved up into legislative districts. “Any state that tries to do that is going to create a legal uproar across the country,” said Jeff Wice, co-editor of the National Conference of State Legislatures’ forthcoming redistricting law handbook for the 2020 census. A 2016 Supreme Court fight over Texas’ statehouse districts foreshadowed this push from Republican states after the 2020 census, since the Lone Star State attorneys argued that states could draw districts based on numbers of voters. |
