Census

Trump’s Reasoning for Citizenship Question on Census Could Also Prohibit Most Citizens From Voting

Posted by on July 5, 2019 at 3:54 pm. 1 Comments :

Among the hallmarks of Donald Trump’s presidency is his brazen disrespect for, and ignorance of, the Constitution of the United States. When he isn’t flagrantly misstating its meaning, he is fiercely striving to subvert its purpose. To him it is an inconvenient sheet of parchment that gets in the way of him doing whatever the heck he wants.

Donald Trump, Constitution

Case in point, Trump’s current dispute with the Supreme Court over whether to include a question about citizenship on the decennial census. The Court recently ruled against Trump on the matter, but he is refusing to let it rest. Never mind that the Constitution clearly states that the census is an enumeration of “persons,” not citizens.

At first, Trump’s own Justice and Commerce Departments acceded to the Court’s decision and stated that the Census would be printed without the citizenship question. But this must have angered Trump, or more likely his “Shadow Cabinet” on Fox News. Because Trump later tweeted that he was still seeking ways of going forward with the question despite the Supreme Court’s ruling. He even called his own cabinet secretaries fake news:

On Friday morning Trump elaborated on this “quest” when a reporter asked him about it (video below). His response was a startling display of arrogance and ignorance. After babbling about his his many alleged options, Trump revealed his absurd justification for including a question that has been independently assessed to be discriminatory:

“I just spoke with the Attorney General. We have a number of different avenues. We could use all of them or just one. […] If you look at the history of our country, it’s almost always been asked.”

Let’s set aside the fact that Attorney General William Barr is once again acting as Trump’s personal lawyer, rather than the chief law enforcement official for the American people.

More to the point, Trump is arguing that because there was a citizenship question on the census in the past, there should be one now. But If you take Trump’s advice and look at the history of our country, what you’ll find is that African-Americans and women have almost always been prohibited from voting. So by the same ludicrous logic, it would be justifiable to restore those prohibitions. And that would literally prohibit most citizens from voting.

For the record, a citizenship question was not asked for most of the first fifty years the U.S. existed. Then it began to be asked just after the civil war, until around 1950. That’s curious timing, don’t you think? Thereafter it has been asked of only a small sample of the population. But now Trump wants to ask everybody. In his morning media scrum, he was also asked why the question was so important. And here he said aloud what his aides surely meant for him to keep secret:

“You need it for many reasons. Number one, you need it for Congress. You need it for Congress for districting. You need it for appropriations. Where are the funds going?”

So Trump is now calling his own Justice Department liars. Their original reason had something to do with needing the question to help enforce the Voting Rights Act. That, of course, makes no sense at all. And it’s one of the reasons they lost in the Supreme Court. Even worse, a few weeks ago Trump’s Solicitor General explicitly told the Supreme Court that redistricting was not the reason for the question. So much for that transparently dishonest excuse.

Worst of all, trump is now admitting that his reason for the question is to impact redistricting in a manner that would suppress the votes of a largely Democratic electorate, while helping Republicans to hang on to their white nationalist power base. What we have here is Trump getting caught in a complex web of lies in order to justify a partisan and racist policy that violates the Constitution. In other, business as usual in the Era of Trump.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Wannabe Dictator Trump Proposes Violating Constitution Due to Supreme Court’s Census Decision

Posted by on June 27, 2019 at 1:20 pm. 3 Comments :

The examples of Donald Trump trying to subvert the Constitution that he allegedly swore to defend keep piling up. Whether it’s his efforts to suppress the media that he calls “the enemy of the people,” or enriching himself with money from foreign governments, or his attempts to ban immigrants based on their religion, or his phony national “emergency” to get funding for his border wall, or his threats to engage in warfare without the consent of Congress. Trump has demonstrated that he has zero respect for the document that defines America’s principles.

Donald Trump Tyrant Dictator

On Thursday morning the Supreme Court issued a ruling that dashed the Trump administration’s hopes of perverting the census by adding a question on citizenship. The Court sent the matter back to the district court that already ruled against Trump. But rather than respecting the decision, Trump lashed out on Twitter (of course) with a flagrantly contra-legal suggestion:

It won’t surprise anyone to learn that Trump is incapable of grasping why the citizenship question is improper and discriminatory. His only interest is in distorting the census results by smothering responses from immigrant residents. He doesn’t know that the census is a count of ALL those residing in the United States, without respect to citizenship. And his purpose – along with the Trump Republican Nationalist Party – is to repress the representation of districts that traditionally vote Democratic.

It’s a purely political motivation that is driving Trump. But his intention to delay the census for his partisan benefit is also unpatriotic and unconstitutional. The census is stipulated to take place by Article I, Section 2 of the US Constitution. It isn’t voluntary or discretional. And federal law goes even farther to assign an April 1st date for the census to be undertaken. Trump’s tweet, therefore, expresses a blatant desire to breach the Constitution and federal law – again. Ironically, the census is found in the same section of the Constitution that grants Congress the sole power of impeachment. Maybe that’s why Trump is avoiding it.

The fact that Trump can announce these criminal acts so publicly is reflective of his disrespect for the law and his aspirations for the powers of the tyrants he admires (Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, Xi Jinping, etc.). He often comments on his jealously of their despotic rule. And remarks like these refute any claim that he might have just been joking.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

The American people want and deserve an accurate census. And Trump’s efforts to undermine that for his own purposes have – for the time being – been blocked. But the real patriots in this country need to remain vigilant, because Trump has shown that he will continue to defile the Constitution every chance he gets if he isn’t stopped. It’s shocking and sad that we are all now conscripted into having to defeat the President’s unconstitutional ambitions.

Fox News Lies About Census Coverage

Posted by on February 9, 2009 at 3:19 pm. 11 Comments :

When Barack Obama nominated Republican Senator Judd Gregg to be Commerce Secretary, there was a well deserved outcry from Democrats and minority advocates. This is a man who twice voted to eliminate the cabinet position he now hopes to occupy.

Amongst the responsibilities of the Commerce Secretary is the Bureau of the Census. The prospect of having a far-right Republican running an agency for which he has shown contempt spurred the Obama administration to announce that the Director of the Census would work closely with the White House. Now, that announcement has sparked complaints from Republicans, who accused the President of politicizing the Census.

There are plenty of reasons to regard these accusations with ridicule. First of all, the Census has always been political. Any process that determines the party apportionment in Congress is going to have partisan ramifications. George Bush installed the manager of his presidential campaign, Don Evans, as his Commerce Secretary. Would anyone be foolish enough to assert that that wasn’t political?

Fox News, however, takes hypocrisy to new levels. Bill Sammon, Deputy Managing Editor for Fox, reported today on the move to have the Census be overseen by the White House. Predictably, he demeaned the proposal as a Democratic power grab. Then he went on to brag that only Fox News was reporting this critical story. He specifically said that he had checked for other news reports and found none.

Well, apparently he didn’t check ABC or MSNBC or CNN or the Washington Post or the New York Times.

It’s bad enough that Fox is misreporting this story on a substantive basis; that they fail to provide context or balance by showing what previous administrations have done; and that they load up their broadcast with an ignorance-fueled outrage. Do they also have to demonstrate such deliberately shoddy research skills so that they can pretend to be a lonely clarion for their pseudo-truths?

Watch for this issue to consume more and more airtime at Fox News. After the Sammon report, anchor Martha MacCallum and chief Washington correspondent Jim Angle repeated the boast. They are already running promos on the subject for Bret Baier’s Special Report. This will be Fox’s first official, post-inaugural disinformation campaign. They are now intent on doing to President Obama what they did to candidate Obama with Rev. Wright, Bill Ayres, ACORN, and the rest of their phony smears.

Fox is fortifying their position with sustained attacks from Glenn Beck to Bill O’Reilly to Sean Hannity, in support of their colleagues on the “news” team. Enough of the electorate was wise to the Fox propaganda assault last November to produce an Obama victory. We can only hope that people continue to pay attention and recognize lies when they hear them.