-A controversial announcement
from US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross.
-Commerce Department today announced changes to the census.
-Plans to add back a question on citizenship status.
-Is this person a citizen of the United States?
These nine words are at the heart of a massive dustup
around the 2020 census
that has culminated in a Supreme Court case
not just about whether or not it's constitutional
to ask about citizenship,
but whether or not the way the Commerce Department
went about adding the questions was even legal.
Let's start at the beginning.
In every decade since 1790,
the United States has completed a census.
It's required by the Constitution, and it matters.
A lot.
It guides how federal tax dollars are allocated,
and how political power is doled out.
It determines the number of congressional seats
and Electoral College votes that each state gets,
and the demographic data helps guide business decisions.
The census hasn't always been the same.
It's been different lengths and had different questions.
But there hasn't been a question about citizenship since 1950.
-But since the mid-2000s,
there's a separate, longer form survey
that goes to a small subset of the people
who get the census itself,
and that's called the American Community Survey.
-The American Community Survey
is sent to 1 in 38 households every year,
and unlike the full census, it does ask about citizenship.
But Trump Administration officials
argue that isn't enough.
-Following receipt of DoJ's letter, and during our review,
Census Bureau officials recognize
that current ACS data did not meet
DoJ's request for census-block level data.
-The Department of Justice letter said
that the data from the citizenship question
is critical to its ability to prosecute cases
under section two of the Voting Rights Act,
which aims at stopping racial discrimination
in voting practices by federal, state, and local governments.
That is called vote dilution, and it can be caused by anything
from redistricting to tough voter-ID laws.
Anything that substantially and measurably gets
in the way of a demographic group's ability to vote.
So what does this have to do with citizenship and the census?
-The key to vote-dilution cases
is measuring how many eligible voters are there.
-Think of it like a math problem.
In order to measure eligible voters of any demographic group,
you need to know how many total citizens there are in an area,
not just how many people live there.
-But a lot of people say the American Community Survey
already gives you, you know, granular data on vote dilution.
You can use statistical modeling to see
whether that's happening already,
and there's been no qualms.
Experts have not raised any concerns about the ACS data.
-Vote-dilution cases are pretty rare.
There haven't been any filed under the Trump Administration,
and there were only two filed under the Obama Administration.
So the DoJ's request has been met
with all kinds of resistance.
Former Census Bureau directors and civil-rights attorneys argue
that reinstating the question could lead
to an incorrect count.
-So, the risk is that you would have a large
non-response for this population,
and you would have a large under-count.
-It would make the census less accurate,
defaulting on the constitutional duty,
but also impacting politics around the country
in pretty unpredictable ways.
-And it's gonna detract, dissuade,
and intimidate people from participating in the census.
-So cities, states, and civil-rights groups,
they sued the government, arguing Ross' move
to reinstate the question is unconstitutional.
To understand what's going on now,
we need to go back to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross.
See, the letter from the DoJ
didn't just come out of thin air.
He had been asking aids about how to get the question
back on the census since he took office.
And records show that the Commerce Department
asked the Justice Department
to give the Commerce Department justification
for reinstating the question.
But Ross isn't allowed to just do that.
The law stipulates that in order for Ross to add
a question to the census -- or make any change --
he's required to examine the data,
take the advice of career officials into account,
and inform Congress within an allotted time period.
He also has to be totally transparent
about the reasoning for that change.
-Three different judges have found that Wilbur Ross
did not follow the law in adding the question back in,
because he ignored the experts in his own department,
because he didn't state the real reason
for adding the question back in,
because he didn't notify Congress
within the allotted time frame that he should have given them.
-The judges in California and Maryland
also said the move was unconstitutional.
-You know, yes, there are big, weighty questions
about political representation, but it boils down to,
"Did you follow the law?"
-In order to start the 2020 census on time,
it needs to be printed on time,
and that means it needs to get to the printer by June,
with or without the citizenship question,
which doesn't leave time for these cases
to go through the normal appellate process.
So they're going directly to the Supreme Court.
If the question is approved,
there's no way to know what its impact will be
until well after the census is complete.