Does the Constitution prohibit the Census from asking how many citizens America has? If that seems like the most confused question you’ve heard, you might have missed the morning papers.
As many as 20 states — the big Democratic ones, in the main — are hatching a vast new legal campaign against the Trump administration. Ignorance is bliss, they say. They want to stop the administration from launching in 2020 a Census that would ask, among other things, whether one is a citizen. It might scare off undocumented immigrants from answering the Census.
“Fouling” the Census is the way The Washington Post described the administration’s plan. The New York Times trundled in the next day with an editorial saying the White House is “trifling” with the Census.
What they fear is that asking about citizenship could reduce the population tally of blue states and Democratic congressional districts. It could mean they’d lose out on government money — and representatives in Congress.
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