Pelosi Says Census Citizenship Question Is About Trying To 'Make America White Again'
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn’t want a citizenship question on the 2020 census. Surprise, surprise, I know. However, her most recent reasons for opposition might induce a few eyebrows to raise.
It’s not just because the government wants to scare certain immigrant populations away from filling out the census, although of course there’s that too. No, she says it’s because the president is racist.
According to CNN, Pelosi made the comments at a media conference in San Francisco, where she accused the Republicans of trying to ensure “just their people vote and not the general population” by trying to get the question — the inclusion of which was blocked by the Supreme Court late last month — back into the survey.
“That’s why they’re fighting the census,” she said.
“But this is about keeping — you know, Make America, you know his hat — Make America White Again,” Pelosi continued.
“They want to make sure that people, certain people, are counted.”
Pelosi gave the usual arguments, too, saying that Republicans want “to put a chilling effect so that certain populations will not answer the form.”
She also noted that the House would soon vote on whether to hold Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt of Congress over failing to provide documents regarding the decision to place the question on the 2020 ballot.
But really, “Make America White Again?”
Last I checked, nobody was going to be deported from the United States for disclosing their citizenship on the census. The demographics of the United States will still continue to shift in predictable directions.
In fact, the citizenship question won’t even make a difference in terms of congressional apportionment or Electoral College votes. That would take a constitutional amendment, and the odds of that happening any time within the next few decades are roughly the same as the odds of the Kansas City Royals winning the Super Bowl.
Therein lies one potential reason that Pelosi might not want the citizenship question on there: It’ll show Americans just how much difference there would be in terms of congressional representation and Electoral College votes if non-citizens weren’t counted.
Last July, The New York Times ran an interesting piece regarding the citizenship question and how it would change the electoral landscape if only voting-age citizens were counted. They based their findings on the American Community Survey, a less-comprehensive survey than the census but useful given the thought exercise.
According to the ACS, nine seats would move if only voting-age citizens were factored into apportionment. California would lose five, Texas three, New York one. Colorado, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia would all gain one.
But that wasn’t all a reapportionment based on citizenship would change.
“The more notable effects would probably occur not in Congress, but within states, as local districts are redrawn. The Miami metro area holds 29 percent of Florida’s population, but 26 percent of its voting-age citizens,” The Times’ Emily Badger wrote.
“New York City holds 43 percent of the state’s population, but just 39 percent of its voting-age citizens. In these examples — as well as in Phoenix, Chicago, Las Vegas and Houston — state legislative seats would shift toward more rural areas that have fewer noncitizens, but also fewer children, and probably fewer Hispanics and Asians.”
A demographer with the liberal Brookings Institution lamented this potential change: “This overemphasis — of rural versus urban, of older versus young, of whites versus minorities — will be involved in those redistricting patterns implicitly,” William H. Frey said.
One could interpret this as an endorsement of illegal immigration or vastly increased legal immigration simply because it balances things out toward areas and demographics that the Brookings Institution finds electorally favorable.
Of course, just by saying that, I can almost see the apparition of St. Nancy of San Francisco appearing in front of my computer, chastising me for trying to “Make America White Again” by the mere suggestion that the left is using human beings cynically for its electoral advantage.
As of right now, all of this hypothesizing remains moot and the citizenship question remains shelved. The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the administration’s original legal reasoning for adding the question — that it was necessary to secure part of the Voting Rights Act — did not pass legal muster.
Attorney General William Barr said there’s still an opportunity to get the question back on there, however, if the issue is clarified.
“I agree with him that the Supreme Court decision was wrong,” Barr said in an interview with The Associated Press, adding that there was “an opportunity potentially to cure the lack of clarity that was the problem and we might as well take a shot at doing that.”
The AP also reported that “a senior official said President Donald Trump is expected to issue a memorandum to the Commerce Department instructing it to include the question on census forms.”
As for the question striking fear in immigrant communities, I have no doubt that both the government and those who benefit from non-citizens being counted in the census will get the word out that there’s absolutely no danger in returning the document. At least in the latter case, they’ll be around to make sure nobody “Makes America White Again.” Yeesh.
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