The New York Times, August 7, 2020: Opinion | Trump and His Allies Think They Know Who Counts
Over the last few years, the Trump administration has fought to shape the 2020 census to its political benefit and the benefit of the Republican Party. In 2018, it sought to introduce a citizenship question on the census itself, to reduce response rates among immigrant communities. Then, after that was rebuffed by the Supreme Court, it tried to exclude unauthorized immigrants altogether, in direct conflict with the Constitution, which calls on Congress to count “the whole number of persons in each State.” Now it wants to cut the census short and deliver it uncompleted — a last-ditch effort to rig the nation’s politics for the sake of its exclusionary political vision.
The goal is to freeze political representation in place as much as possible; to keep demographic change — the growing share of Americans who are Black, Hispanic and Asian-American — from swamping the Republican Party’s ability to win national elections with a white, heavily rural minority.
The census, as Trump and his allies correctly understand, is a critical source of dynamism within the American political system. A political majority (or in Trump’s case, a minority) can try to insulate itself from demographic shifts and transformations, but the fact of mandatory reapportionment makes that difficult. New people — whether immigrants or Americans moving from place to place — will always mean new politics.
It is ironic, then, that the origin of the census lies less in principles of democratic representation, and more in the interests of slaveholders, who wanted political recognition of their slave wealth, with constitutional assurance that this peculiar interest would always weigh on future apportionment. But in a perfect example of unintended consequences, the slaveholders’ push for a census would help lay the groundwork for the end of the institution itself.
