The Patriot Post® · Restoring Common Census

On Jan. 15, U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to put a question regarding citizenship on the 2020 census. “Hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of people will go uncounted in the census if the citizenship question is included,” the judge declared. People? More like many of the 22 million illegal aliens residing in America, if a recent study conducted by professors from Yale and MIT is accurate.

According to Furman, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, tasked with conducting the Census, dropped the ball. “In arriving at his decision as he did, Secretary Ross violated the law” and “the public trust,” the judge asserted. Furman further insisted the Administrative Procedures Act requires an agency to “consider all important aspects of a problem; study the relevant evidence and arrive at a decision rationally supported by that evidence; comply with all applicable procedures.”

According to Furman, Ross “fell short on all these fronts.”

Ross fell short? Furman, an appointee of Barack Obama, was forced to concede that Ross’s efforts are “not inconsistent with the Constitution,” and that the plaintiffs “did not carry their burden of proving that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross was motivated by invidious discrimination and thus that he violated the equal protection component of the due process clause.” Nonetheless, Furman declared that nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) will suffer “a loss of political power and funds, among other harms,” if a citizenship question is included on the census.

Which NGOs? The plaintiffs included the New York Immigration Coalition, CASA de Maryland, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee/ADC Research Institute, and Make the Road New York. These are largely radical leftist organizations partially funded by taxpayers via government grants — grants that can be dependent on census totals.

In other words, it’s about money. Yet Furman also rejected Ross’s rationale for including the question. Ross wanted to promote enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. Furman dismissed that concern as “pretextual,” adding that the citizenship question elicited “near uniform opposition to the addition of the citizenship question from stakeholders.”

The stakeholders to whom Furman refers are groups who wield influence over Census Bureau’s National Advisory Committee on Race and Ethnicity. They are joined by other outside groups who reside within the Committee. Virtually all of them are radical leftist entities whose interests and objectives have little to do with the well-being of the nation as a whole.

Furman’s ruling is the first of many, as additional lawsuits filed by several states and cities are also aimed to block a question that hasn’t appeared on the Census since 1950.

Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, criticized the decision, saying, “I don’t see how a judge can say there’s something wrong with wanting to get data on the number of citizens and noncitizens in the country because that information is, I think, vital to having an educated debate about immigration policy.”

Who wants to have that educated debate? Certainly not the Democrat Party, half the GOP, Hollywood, academia, the media, or corporate America. All of them embrace the globalist agenda of open borders, sanctuary cities, and the ongoing dilution of immigration law enforcement efforts they deem “racist” and “xenophobic.”

And what about an educated debate about voting? The Washington Post’s David Gans asserts the Voting Rights Act is “in tatters” because in 2013 the Supreme Court eliminated the flagrantly outdated and unconstitutional idea that “racist” states still required “preclearance” to change their voting requirements. “Our democracy hasn’t been the same since,” Gans laments. “In 2018, as in past years, voter suppression ran rife.”

Not quite. Voter turnout for the 2018 midterm election hit a 50-year high. Moreover, according to Ben Ray Luján, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), Latinos increased their participation by 174%, and black Americans by 157%, compared to the previous midterm elections.

What’s really in tatters is the progressive Narrative that asserts any effort to clean up voter rolls or impose voter ID requirements is de facto racism. Yet as a Judicial Watch lawsuit against California revealed, data provided to and published by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission showed Los Angeles County with a voter a registration rate of 112% of its adult citizen population. The state has an overall registration rate of about 101% of its age-eligible citizenry.

California is hardly an outlier. According to a 2017 article by Deroy Murdock, there are 462 counties nationwide where the voter registration rate exceeded 100%.

There is nothing remotely racist about cleaning up this (often orchestrated) mess. Moreover, the real racism with regard to voting is the assertion that some Americans of particular ethnic groups or genders are inherently incapable of acquiring the same ID that everyone else is apparently capable of procuring.

The DOJ is unlikely to let Furman’s decision to stand. “Our government is legally entitled to include a citizenship question on the census and people of the United States have a legal obligation to answer,” Kelly Laco, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said in a statement. “Reinstating the citizenship question ultimately protects the right to vote and helps ensure free and fair elections for all Americans.”

Does the Left want free and fair elections? The 1993 National Voter Registration Act and the 2002 Help America Vote Act require each state to maintain accurate voter rolls. Yet as the above evidence indicates, these laws are often ignored.

Yet there is something far more important at stake here: It is data from the U.S. Census that determines the number of members from each state who are elected to the House of Representatives. Thus, states with large numbers of illegal aliens will unconstitutionally gain members in that chamber, and deny citizens of other states of their rightful representation. Moreover, those same states will receive a disproportionately larger share of federal funding — which arguably incentivizes the addition of noncitizens to a state’s population.

Is that what the citizens of America want? “This ruling is a forceful rebuke of the Trump administration’s attempt to weaponize the census for an attack on immigrant communities,” insisted the American Civil Liberties Union in a statement.

Immigrant communities are under attack? In the last couple of years, the Left has advocated for the elimination of the Electoral College, the reapportionment of the Senate to reflect population totals, same-day voter registration, ballot harvesting, and a repeal of voter ID requirements. In other words, leftists want mob rule enabled by an increasingly unidentifiable mob they insist would never, ever cast votes illegally.

“Inadvertently” or falsely registered voters, “dead” voters, voters registered in more than one state, or voters fraudulently casting ballots in places like California, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Indiana, or Texas suggest otherwise.

The Census Bureau is required to finalize its 2020 questionnaire by June of this year. The Trump administration must seek a stay of Furman’s ruling at the Second Circuit Court. If that fails, the Supreme Court should accept an expedited review.

The alternative? The continuing devaluation of citizenship and Rule of Law. It doesn’t get more globalist than that.