Is Trump About To Do The Thing The Census Bureau Told Him To Do In The First Place? Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Tierney Sneed

Is Trump About To Do The Thing The Census Bureau Told Him To Do In The First Place?

Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Tierney Sneed / 1h

To say that situation around President Trump’s census citizenship fight is fluid is an understatement.

But the current state of play — per ABC News, NBC News and CNN — is that Trump is backing down from pushing to get the question on the census and instead is going to issue a directive instructing the Commerce Department to collect citizenship data from other sources.

What those other sources would be is very unclear; the reports are vague. An administration official told NBC that the President was going to work to make known “who’s in this country legally and lawfully.” There’s an irony in that statement given that the question that administration wanted to put on the census did not ask legal status.

But that detail aside, it sure sounds like Trump is going to order his administration to do exactly what the Census Bureau recommended it do, back in December 2017, when the idea of adding the citizenship question was first raised to the Bureau.

The Bureau’s top officials said at the time that using other sources to study citizenship instead of asking it on the decennial survey would result in more accurate data. The bureau then repeatedly confirmed that in studies undertaken after the initial recommendation.

They took a closer look at how the question performed on the American Community Survey — a smaller scale survey conducted by the Bureau that goes out on a rolling basis to just a portion of the population — and it turns out that one-third of the time, non-citizens inaccurately reported that they were citizens.

A more accurate way to determine the number of citizens in the country, the Bureau said, was to look at the existing records held by government, across several agencies, where this kind of misrepresentation happens less frequently.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross for the most part blew off that recommendation. However, after some back and forth with the Bureau, he instructed it to go ahead and assemble the existing records on citizenship to be used to supplement the data collected from asking about citizenship on the 2020 census.

The Bureau warned that Ross’ approach would still be less accurate than depending on existing records alone, and would still bring all the costs and risks that come with asking about citizenship on the census.

Ross overruled that advice.

His insistence on going forward with the question after being offered a more accurate, less risky alternative approach was a major point in the lawsuits challenging this question.

Lower courts ruled that this aspect of his decision violated the Administrative Procedure Act. However, Chief Justice John Roberts, with the other conservative justices, sided with the government by saying that this element of Ross’ decision was not a reason to strike down. (Roberts joined the liberals on the narrow point that the rationale Ross offered was bogus, meaning that in the future he’d allow a citizenship question to be added if a legitimate reason was offered).

Time will tell if the existing records approach is what Trump is really asking for in the directive he’ll unveil later Thursday.

Either way, I’d reckon that this is not the end of the larger fight that was motivating Trump’s efforts: the GOP push to exclude non-citizens from the count used to draw legislative districts. Such a change would be a boon for Republicans because it would reduce the number of Democratic-leaning seats in immigrant-rich regions of the country.

Earlier this year, Census Bureau officials confirmed they were moving forward with collecting the citizenship data from the existing records, regardless of what happened in the legal fight over the question. They also suggested that the data could then be used on the redistricting file that is offered to states for drawing their maps.

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