How Trump Instantly Blew Up Weeks Of Pious DOJ Denials About Census Change

Trump blabbered. yes. he. did.


How Trump Instantly Blew Up Weeks Of Pious DOJ Denials About Census Change



https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/dc/trump-census-citizenship-redistricting-justice-department
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By Tierney Sneed
July 8, 2019 2:49 pm

“Meritless.”

“Frivolous.”

A “conspiracy theory” that “hinges on wordplay.”

This is how the Department of Justice described the efforts by its legal foes to connect the Trump administration’s push to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census to the partisan motives of a deceased GOP operative.

But comments last week by President Trump suggest that his administration and the operative, GOP gerrymandering guru Thomas Hofeller, did in fact share a similar goal: a new method of redistricting that would exclude non-citizens from the count used to draw legislative districts.

Hofeller secretly studied the effect of such an overhaul — in an unpublished 2015 analysis that concluded that it would be “functionally unworkable” without a census citizenship question — and said it “would be advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.”

The Department of Justice vehemently denied there was any connection between Hofeller’s memo and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s decision last year to add the question, despite Hofeller being the first person to raise to the Trump transition team the issue of the census citizenship question......................................................

But on Friday, when asked why he was trying to re-add the question to the census, President Trump told reporters, “You need it for Congress, for districting.”.................................