The House Committee on Oversight and Reform released documents on Wednesday that show how the Trump administration unsuccessfully tried to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census as part of a gamble for partisan gain.
The document is roughly 500 pages and includes several drafts of a 2017 memo that appear to show Trump officials scheming to use the citizenship question to influence how congressional seats and electoral votes are divvied up by census members.
Citizenship Question
In one of the earlier memos, a Commerce Department lawyer warned that a citizenship question would likely be illegal. However, after several rounds of feedback on that draft from a Trump appointee in the Commerce Department, the lawyer, Hames Uthmeier, appeared to change his tune.
He then told then-Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in a new draft that there were "bases for legal arguments" to include the citizenship question. Critics warned that the move would undercount Hispanic voters.
The House Committee obtained a handwritten note that suggested Ross, despite testifying under oath that his citizenship question push was prompted by a request from the Justice Department, was himself actually involved in concocting the DOJ request, as per the Daily Beast.
The memos and emails of the Trump administration pertaining to the citizenship question have long been kept from the public. They were disclosed by lawmakers following a more than two-year legal fight that began after the former president's officials refused to turn them over for a congressional investigation.
President Joe Biden's administration, citing the "exceptional circumstances" of the case, agreed to allow House Oversight Committee members and their staff to review the documents. The controversial question is: "Is this person a citizen of the United States?"
According to NPR, the question ultimately did not end up on the 2020 census forms as in 2019, the Supreme Court blocked the Trump administration's unprecedented efforts after its use of the Voting Rights Act as the stated reasoning for the question "seems to have been contrived."
Secret Agenda
The attempt to add the citizenship question came before Trump released a presidential memo in 2020 that called for the unprecedented exclusion of unauthorized immigrants from a key set of census numbers.
The newly disclosed documents reveal a detailed look into some of the early behind-the-scenes discussions at a time when Trump officials were focused on keeping their plans under wraps. The release of the documents also comes as Congress considers a House bill that could help shield upcoming national head counts from the kind of interference that saddled the 2020 census during the Trump administration.
The chairwoman of the committee, Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney of New York, said that for years, the Trump administration delayed and obstructed the oversight committee's investigation into the true reason for adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census despite the Supreme Court ruling the administration's efforts as illegal.
She added that the memo of the committee pulls back the curtain on the shameful conduct and shows how clearly the Trump administration secretly tried to manipulate the census for political gain while lying to the public and Congress about their objectives, the New York Times reported.
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