A majority of the members of the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday saw the justification offered by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross for adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census for exactly what it was: a lie, though the court was more delicate in its terminology.
Ross has said repeatedly that government needs to ask people about their citizenship in order to determine how many noncitizens there are in the country. That information, he has said, is essential to better enforcement of the federal Voting Rights Act.
But that’s disingenuous. In fact, Ross and his allies in the Trump administration hoped that the question would lead to depressed Latino participation in the census, an undercount of millions of people, a reduction in Democratic representation in the next reapportionment and diminished federal spending to Democratic parts of the country by billions of dollars.
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