An effort by House Democrats to find out why the Justice Department wants a citizenship-status question on the 2020 census status was blocked Wednesday by their Republican colleagues, even as some lawmakers vowed to continue investigating the genesis of the controversial new question. In a letter sent to the U.S. Census Bureau last year, the Justice Department argued that “a reliable calculation of the citizen voting-age population in localities where voting rights violations are alleged or suspected.”
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross later said he would honor the request. But many advocates and experts believe the question is unnecessary and, worse, politically motivated. Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, the California attorney general, Xavier Becerra, and its secretary of state, Alex Padilla, argued that the question “would discourage noncitizens and their citizen family members from responding to the census, resulting in a less accurate population count.”
Such an undercount, in turn, could benefit Republicans during the decennial redrawing of district lines by counting fewer people in Democratic-leaning districts. Eighteen states, including California, are suing President Trump’s administration over the question. In a parallel effort undertaken earlier this month, first-term Rep. Jimmy Gomez, D-Calif., a member of the House Oversight Committee, accused the Trump administration of “disgraceful political games” and introduced a request for information that would have forced the Justice Department to turn over documents related to its decision to ask the controversial question
The motion by Gomez, which would have required Gore’s office to produce documentation of how it decided on the citizenship question, met the same fate Wednesday, failing in a partisan 20-16 vote. That vote followed a charged debate in which Democrats accused the Trump administration of attempting to suppress voter rights. Republicans, for their part, noted that citizenship had once been part of the census, and argued that its reintroduction would only abet the cause of representative democracy. Democrats argued strongly for the Gomez motion. “The census is supposed to be a non-partisan endeavor,” said Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md. Gomez said he wanted to know whether anti-immigration advocates like Stephen Miller, a senior White House adviser, or Kris W. Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state who was formerly head of a short-lived voter fraud panel, were involved in the effort — or whether Trump himself perhaps was. . . . Republicans, meanwhile, assured that Gomez’s measure was unnecessary.
Rep. Mark Meadows, R.-N.C., assured Gomez that the House Oversight Committee would do a full inquiry into the citizenship question — in time. “The census, the 2020 census,” Meadows said, “will not happen for over two years, and if we cannot accommodate for just a few weeks, I just find troubling.” Others Republicans indicated that they had no trouble with the question, with Rep. Paul Mitchell, R-Mich., criticizing Democrats for succumbing to a “the-sky-is-falling” mentality fostered by some news outlets.
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