109 replies to this topic

[Bact PhD]

golden_valley, on 31 May 2019 - 09:55 AM, said:

The above quote mentions "Non-Hispanic Whites." Does this mean there are Hispanic Whites? Who would they be? Light skinned people from Spain maybe?

Yup. Lots of light-skinned Cubans in South FL, especially those who came pre-Mariel.

[Beelzebuddy]

golden_valley, on 31 May 2019 - 09:55 AM, said:

The above quote mentions "Non-Hispanic Whites." Does this mean there are Hispanic Whites? Who would they be? Light skinned people from Spain maybe?

Yes, plus all light skinned spanish speakers

[LFC]

Trump's personal lawyers, formerly known as the Department of Justice, are screeching about the bombshell that proved the reasoning given for adding a census citizenship question was all a fraud and that a senior DoJ official was up to his eyeballs in the lying. The screeching seems to be all sound and fury without actually addressing the evidence because, well, why should they?

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The Justice Department said Thursday that the assertions of new, damning evidence in the census citizenship case were “false” in a fiery statement that nonetheless did not specifically dispute core claims in the latest allegations.

“These eleventh-hour allegations by the plaintiffs, including an accusation of dishonesty against a senior Department of Justice official, are false,” a Justice Department spokesperson said in the statement, which was issued more than 12 hours after the allegations were made public in court filings.

The challengers in the case have accused John Gore — a DOJ official who played a crucial role in the administration’s effort to include a citizenship question on the 2020 census — of false testimony for failing to disclose that he received a draft of a request to add the question from an outside advisor. Newly obtained documents revealed that the draft — allegedly passed along to Gore by the advisor, Mark Newman — was ghostwritten by a now-deceased Republican gerrymandering expert. The expert had conducted a study in 2015 that said a census citizenship question was needed to conduct a redistricting overhaul that would boost the GOP’s electoral advantages. The challengers claim that key points from the study made it into the formal request that Gore wrote.

“Before today, Mr. Gore had never heard of the unpublished study apparently obtained from the personal effects of a deceased political consultant,” the DOJ spokesperson said Thursday. “That study played no role in the Department’s December 2017 request to reinstate a citizenship question to the 2020 decennial census. These unfounded allegations are an unfortunate last-ditch effort to derail the Supreme Court’s consideration of this case. The Department looks forward to responding in greater detail to these baseless accusations in its filing on Monday.”

Gore did not disclose that he had received the draft from Neuman until well after a trial court had already decided the case. He admitted it in a closed door interview with Congress. However, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross quickly cast doubt on the claim, telling lawmakers in public testimony that Gore only “thought” it “might” have happened and that Neuman had denied passing the draft in his trial deposition.

The Justice Department did not respond to a follow-up inquiry by TPM seeking to clarify whether it was disputing that Gore received the draft from Neuman.

[LFC]

Democrats are asking the IGs to look into the Trump administration's lying and coverups over the census citizenship questions. There's a nice summary of what has gone down on this issue in the piece as well though without any mention of lying Wilbur Ross.

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More than a dozen Senate Democrats have asked the inspectors general at the Commerce Department and the Department of Justice to review new claims, made in the census citizenship question case, about the political motivations behind adding the question.

The letter, whose signatories include Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), requests that the inspectors general investigate efforts by the administration to conceal the role played by a now-deceased GOP gerrymandering guru in getting the question added to the 2020 census.

[JackD]

In this administration can the IG's make any difference?

[LFC]

The House committee is scheduling a contempt vote for Barr and Ross. LOCK THEM UP! LOCK THEM UP!

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The House Oversight Committee will vote to hold Attorney General Bill Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in civil contempt for their defiance of subpoenas in the committee’s Census citizenship question investigation.

Chairman Elijah Cummings sent Barr and Ross letters Monday informing them the committee was scheduling the contempt vote.

The letters give the two officials one last chance to, by June 6, produce the documents the committee demanded.

The committee in April issued subpoenas for 11 key documents related to the decision to add the question. It also sought the testimony from Justice Department official John Gore, who was involved in writing a Justice Department request that the question be added. Gore sat down for a voluntary interview with the committee earlier this year but declined to answer certain questions on the instruction of the DOJ lawyer. The committee subpoenaed him for the full testimony, but he did not show up for the deposition on the instructions of the Department, which objected to the committee’s refusal to let a DOJ attorney sit in on the deposition.

[Traveler]

So what? I wish that was rhetorical...

[Rich T Bikkies]

Gosh, this is getting so exciting!

[LFC]

Trump's personal lawyers, formerly known as the Department of Justice, come out screeching about the new evidence that the citizenship question was being included solely so that it could help Republicans in elections. Barr continues to shit on the Constitution by lying for Trump.

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The Justice Department came out guns blazing in a court filing Monday evening denying many of the claims of new evidence and alleged false testimony in the census citizenship case.

The Justice Department called the ACLU’s allegations “meritless” and “inflammatory,” while comparing the ACLU’s arguments to the “conjuring ” of a “conspiracy theory involving a deceased political operative that essentially hinges on wordplay.”

“The [ACLU’s] motion borders on frivolous, and appears to be an attempt to reopen the evidence in this already-closed case and to drag this Court into Plaintiffs’ eleventh-hour campaign to improperly derail the Supreme Court’s resolution of the government’s appeal,” the Department said. “The Court should not countenance Plaintiffs’ tactics.”

The Justice Department denied that its December 2017 formal request that a citizenship question be added to the census was at all connected to a 2015 study by a Republican consultant who said such a question could facilitate a redistricting overhaul that would boost the GOP’s electoral advantages.

The Justice Department said any insinuation of similarities between the 2017 request, written by DOJ official John Gore, and the consultant’s study were false.

[LFC]

The ACLU is pushing right back at the DOJ which is clearly dirty on this (as well as multiple other) issue.

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The ACLU filed a fiery letter in court Tuesday evening, pushing back on the Justice Department’s denials that the Trump administration hid key evidence from the groups challenging the census citizenship question.

The ACLU asked the judge, who will hold a hearing on the dispute Wednesday afternoon, to order additional discovery in light of the recent revelation that a GOP political consultant was involved in the administration’s push to add the question.

The ACLU has accused a top DOJ official, as well as an outside adviser to the administration, of lying in their deposition testimonies — claims the Department has vehemently denied.

“In any event, the Justice Department’s hands are not clean,” the ACLU said of the Department’s denials. “Defendants’ misconduct is apparent.”

The extraordinary dispute comes as the case over whether the question stays on the 2020 census has already been heard by the Supreme Court, which is expected to decide it in the coming weeks. A major question in the case is whether the official rationale the administration provided for adding the question — allegedly to enhance DOJ Voting Rights Act enforcement — was a fake one meant to cover up the administration’s real reasons for including it.

The ACLU said Tuesday that the newly obtained evidence would have been a “central part” of its “case in chief,” had the group been aware, at the trial court phase, of the involvement of the GOP consultant, who is now deceased.

The group learned of his involvement — and the politically motivated reasons he was pushing for the question to be added — by a chance series of events. The consultant, Thomas Hofellor, a redistricting guru for the GOP, died last year and his back-up hard drives were discovered in January by his estranged daughter, who provided them for an unrelated gerrymandering case in North Carolina. The census-related files on Hofeller’s driver were eventually shared with the challengers in the citizenship question case.

The ACLU said it received the files less than a week before it turned to the court with its accusations that the evidence had been withheld.

Among the files were a secret study Hofellor wrote in 2015 concluding that a census citizenship question would be necessary for Republicans to overhaul redistricting in a way that would boost the GOP and non-Hispanic whites. There was also a file indicating he had ghostwritten a paragraph of a draft justification for a census citizenship question — a draft that was given to a top DOJ official as he was working on writing the administration’s formal request. The official, John Gore is accused of lying about receiving the draft from an outside advisor, Mark Neuman; Neuman is accused of lying about handing the draft over and about Hofeller’s involvement in writing it.

The ACLU is now seeking that the administration turn over documents, including 18 drafts of the request by Gore, it had previously withheld as privileged in litigation. The group also wants previously withheld documents from 10 others in the administration who were involved the drafting of the formal request.

“The Court can get to the bottom of this,” the ACLU said. “Since Defendants have now squarely put Gore’s process of drafting the letter in issue, they have waived deliberative-process privilege over any documents related to Gore’s drafting process.”

The ACLU wants to depose Gore and Neuman again, and also depose a Commerce official who connected Neuman to Gore. The group additionally is seeking any communications with defense counsel that could shed light on the “extent” the department “knew the falsity of Neuman’s testimony.”

[LFC]

A TPM piece makes the connection between the census and highly important and practical matters to states like disaster relief. Apparently if you tell the government that people aren't there then you don't get money later on to help them. What a thought.

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In the early fall of 2018, North Carolina braced itself for the worst hurricane in the history of the state. As Hurricane Florence made landfall, the storm ravaged our most vulnerable communities, leaving residents struggling to pick up the remaining pieces of their lives.

A collective of community leaders and activist groups mobilized, organizing 80,000 pounds of supplies to be distributed to every impacted county, scheduling airdrops and truck deliveries, and dispatching volunteers. I worked alongside them, helping to coordinate water rescues and evacuating people into temporary shelters. Once the storm finally passed, I helped renovate homes destroyed by water damage.

This moment of crisis may have seemed like an unlikely time to educate people about the 2020 U.S. Census and voting rights.

But the two can’t be disentangled.

In the wake of natural disasters, disaster funding is distributed based on the population. The census is also used in drawing redistricting maps for every state. In other words, as we told the Florence survivors we met on the ground, to fight for the census is to fight for every community’s political voice.

The census has historically undercounted vulnerable and economically disadvantaged communities. For the 2020 census, this problem has only grown. Filling this gap requires an investment in community engagement and a commitment to working alongside vulnerable communities to ensure every person is counted.

The prospective success of the upcoming census looks grim. The 2020 census is scheduled to be offered mainly online, even though 60 million Americans lack access to the Internet.

Those Americans without internet come from the same vulnerable communities who have struggled with underfunding and under-representation in the past: Black and POC communities, rural and vulnerable urban communities. If we do not count these communities, they will be robbed of the helpful resources they are entitled to.

Time and time again, new ways to steal political representation away from these communities are invented by those who want to keep power away from people of color, from the poor and from those who they want to silence. The Republican Party’s success at gerrymandering states like North Carolina has emboldened their efforts to tip the census, as we saw in the recently released files of deceased GOP redistricting mastermind Thomas Hofeller.

As we now know, Hofeller and the dark minds of the GOP not only worked together to craft some of the most egregious partisan gerrymanders in our nation’s history, but to try to get a citizenship question added to the census.

As the ideologically-Republican Supreme Court weighs a citizenship question which could drive millions away from participating in the census, other changes will rob additional citizens of their voice as we count those who live in our country.

[LFC]

The Census Bureau increased their estimate of the number of people they believe the citizenship question would undercount.

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Census Bureau experts have revised their estimate for the effect of a citizenship question in the census, with a study released this past weekend that found it will cause a greater non-response than previously believed.

The Census Bureau had previously assessed that the question would prompt 5.8 percent of households with at least one noncitizen to not respond to the survey. At the time, the estimate was described as “conservative.”

Sure enough, theCensus Bureau has now found that at least 8 percent of households with at least one noncitizen will not respond to survey.

Overall, the study found, that the question would prompt a “2.2 percentage point drop in self-response in the 2020 census, increasing costs and reducing the quality of the population count.”

The judge who was hearing the case concerning the administration's lies requested the appeals court allows him to take another look at the new evidence and how it fits in with a pattern of discrimination.

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A federal judge in Maryland on Monday explained why he wanted another look at potential racial animus behind the Trump administration’s census citizenship question, with an opinion that said it “is becoming difficult to avoid seeing that which is increasingly clear.”

U.S. District Judge George Hazel moved last week to have an appeals court send the case back to him, after new evidence put forward by the challengers suggested a discriminatory intent in adding the citizenship question to the census.

“As more puzzle pieces are placed on the mat, a disturbing picture of the decisionmakers’ motives takes shape,” Hazel said in his opinion Monday.

The challengers in the case asked that he take another look at the issue after they found relevant evidence in the files of a now-deceased GOP redistricting consultant, Thomas Hofeller.

[LFC]

LFC, on 24 June 2019 - 04:32 PM, said:

The judge who was hearing the case concerning the administration's lies requested the appeals court allows him to take another look at the new evidence and how it fits in with a pattern of discrimination.

Access Granted!

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The judge in Maryland U.S. District Judge George Hazel initially did not find that the question had violated the Constitution’s Equal Protection clause in a ruling that struck it down for other reasons.

After the challengers put forward new evidence from the files of a deceased GOP consultant apparently involved in the administration’s move, Hazel sought to have the case sent back to him from the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals, where the case had been appealed.

The appeals court granted that request in an order Tuesday.

The Justice Department opposed the move to send the case back to Hazel and made a last minute push to ask the Supreme Court to address the equal protection claim in the ruling it hands down, likely by the end of the week. In a letter to the Supreme Court filed Tuesday just before the appeals court order, the Justice Department said the new allegations from the challengers were “based on a speculative conspiracy theory that is unsupported by the evidence and legally irrelevant to demonstrating that Secretary Ross acted with a discriminatory intent.”

The new evidence was found on the back-up hard drives of Thomas Hofeller, the GOP’s go-to gerrymandering consultant who died last year. Hofeller analyzed the effect of excluding noncitizens from redistricting — a move that would boost Republicans and non-Hispanic whites, Hofelloer concluded — in an unpublished 2015 study that said a census citizenship question was needed for the change. Hofeller was the first person to recommend that the incoming Trump administration look into the census citizenship issue and he secretly co-wrote a draft justification for the question that was given to the Justice Department, which officially claimed it would help Voting Rights Act enforcement.

Altogether, the evidence suggests that Hofeller had partisan, discriminatory reasons for advocating for the question and then helped craft the bogus rationale use to cover up those reasons, the legal challengers to the question say.

Hazel said in an order last week that the evidence raised a “substantial issue” that warranted him reconsidering his ruling on the equal protection claim.

Two appeals court judges, both Democratic appointees, of a three-judge panel agreed on Tuesday. (The third judge was an appointee of George W. Bush). Judge James Wynn, an Obama appointee, wrote a concurrence that provided Hazel a road map for considering whether the Trump administration had a discriminatory intent. Wynn, quoting the relevant case law, said that “invidious discriminatory purpose may often be inferred from the totality of the relevant facts, including the fact, if it is true, that the law bears more heavily on one race than another.”

“To that end, even in the absence of direct evidence of invidious discriminatory intent, this Court and other courts have found such intent when, for example, a governmental decisionmaker was aware that an action was likely to disproportionately impact a minority group, the decisionmaker declined to impose ameliorative measures to minimize the likely disproportionate impact, the decisionmaker’s process for deciding to take the action deviated from standard practice, and the decisionmaker provided pretextual reasons for taking the action.”

[andydp]

Time for my usual ingenuous question:

If population counts in a district goes down, doesn’t that put the district in jeopardy ?

[JackD]

Yes.

[andydp]

JackD, on 25 June 2019 - 05:00 PM, said:

Yes.

It would be interesting to see if GOP or Dem districts are liable for elimination in this scenario. I’m betting it will be mostly Dem districts.

[D. C. Sessions]

andydp, on 25 June 2019 - 06:36 PM, said:

It would be interesting to see if GOP or Dem districts are liable for elimination in this scenario. I’m betting it will be mostly Dem districts.

Do you really think that they would go to all this trouble to reduce their own power?

[LFC]

andydp, on 25 June 2019 - 06:36 PM, said:

It would be interesting to see if GOP or Dem districts are liable for elimination in this scenario. I’m betting it will be mostly Dem districts.

North Carolina Republicans attempted to gerrymander with incredible racial precision. If they can do that level of analysis at the state level you know they can do it at the national level. Every moved they make that involves voting is ALWAYS for political gain and has nothing to do with supporting the right to vote.

[LFC]

The lawless administration is at it again, aided and abetted by a corrupt, partisan DOJ which is attempting an end run around the court system and asking the Supreme Court to help it. Give McConnell his due, he understands that a supple, compliant, partisan court is important to retaining power. He also understands it's the death of democracy but since that's not working out so well for the GOP he doesn't care.

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The Department of Justice boldly and explicitly asked the Supreme Court on Tuesday to resolve an issue the court hasn’t formally reviewed in the census citizenship case when the justices hand down their decision in the case expected this week.

The request, which the Justice Department has made in a more subtle fashion in previous court filings, is extraordinary and reflects the highly unusual legal battle the Trump administration has engaged in to change the 2020 census.

The Justice Department request came in the form of a letter to the court submitted just a few hours after an appeals court said new evidence warranted the reexamination of a case challenging the citizenship question brought in Maryland.

[LFC]

The lawlessness of the Trump administration continues.

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President Trump tweeted Thursday that he wants to delay the 2020 census after the Supreme Court put a hold on his plan to add a question about citizenship, sending the case back to a lower court for more review. “Seems totally ridiculous that our government, and indeed Country, cannot ask a basic question of Citizenship in a very expensive, detailed and important Census, in this case for 2020,” he wrote. “I have asked the lawyers if they can delay the Census, no matter how long, until the United States Supreme Court is given additional information from which it can make a final and decisive decision on this very critical matter.” The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Trump administration did not provide enough explanation for its plan to add a controversial citizenship question to the census. For the states and human-rights groups that fought the plan, the ruling was considered a success. The census is used to allocate billions of dollars in federal funds, as well as determine how many seats each state gets in the House of Representatives. It is written in the constitution that the census must occur every ten years.