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posted by martyb on Thursday May 30 2019, @09:48PM   Printer-friendly
from the Mandering-the-racist-Jerry dept.

From Slate

If we had a fair Supreme Court not driven by partisanship in its most political cases, Thursday’s blockbuster revelation in the census case would lead the court to unanimously rule in Department of Commerce v. New York to exclude the controversial citizenship question from the decennial survey. Those newly revealed documents show that the Trump administration’s purpose in putting the citizenship question on the upcoming census was not its stated one to help Hispanic voters under the Voting Rights Act, but rather to create policy that would be “a disadvantage to the Democrats” and “advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic Whites.” It’s difficult to produce a greater smoking gun than explicitly saying you are hoping to help the GOP by increasing white voting power. But this revelation, coming from the hard drive of a deceased Republican political operative and made available to Common Cause by his estranged daughter, is ironically more likely to lead the Republican-appointed conservative justices on the Supreme Court to allow the administration to include the question that would help states dilute the power of Hispanic voters.

[...]And here is where Thursday’s revelations fit in. The New York Times reported that the hard drive of the late Republican redistricting guru Thomas B. Hofeller contained documents indicating that the real purpose of including the citizenship question was to allow Republicans to draw new congressional, state, and local legislative districts using equal numbers of eligible voters in each district, not equal numbers of persons, a standard that would greatly reduce the power of Hispanics and Democrats in places like Texas. According to the Times, files on Hofeller’s hard drives, subpoenaed in litigation concerning North Carolina redistricting, show that Hofeller “wrote a study in 2015 concluding that adding a citizenship question to the census would allow Republicans to draft even more extreme gerrymandered maps to stymie Democrats. And months after urging President Trump’s transition team to tack the question onto the census, he wrote the key portion of a draft Justice Department letter claiming the question was needed to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act—the rationale the administration later used to justify its decision.”

[...]Thursday’s revelations should be damning. The ACLU is already seeking sanctions in the trial court in the census case for government officials lying about the real reason for including the citizenship question. But instead the revelations may help to prop up a case that should embarrass government lawyers to argue.

Yep.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Thursday May 30 2019, @11:26PM (3 children)

    by DeathMonkey (1380) on Thursday May 30 2019, @11:26PM (#849481) Journal

    Oh, they're defending it.

    They are actively opposed to representative Democracy because they always lose at it.

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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 31 2019, @01:00AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 31 2019, @01:00AM (#849546)

    Yeah, things were so much better when only the DNC could rig elections. Oh well, they still have the primaries... Bear witness to the last 50 years...

    But, Hey! The democrat Party is cool with all this as long as they lose to republicans. Maintains... "predictability". Since they all eat at the same table, they know what to expect from each other. You let other interests into the picture, and it's total chaos! It was pure madness before the GOP/DNC settled into their groove in the mid/late 1800s. And now, it's a total lock. Everybody else is statistically invisible. And nobody will lift a finger, except to shoot at each other. What could be better?

    • (Score: 3, Troll) by hemocyanin on Friday May 31 2019, @01:49AM (1 child)

      by hemocyanin (186) on Friday May 31 2019, @01:49AM (#849576) Journal

      Oh well, they [Democrats] still have the primaries...

      After the debacle with HRC there was finally some pushback on superdelegates and a compromise solution was reached, superdelagates will only get to vote if no candidate passes a 50% threshold on the first vote. Suddenly it makes sense why there are 18,345 or so candidates running in the Democrat primary. It give superdelegates back their power because it guarantees a second vote -- I wonder what they have to pay the filler candidates to run so they can go ahead and pick the next HRC on the second vote?

      • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 31 2019, @02:36AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 31 2019, @02:36AM (#849592)

        the next HRC on the second vote

        That would be Biden. Shame that his voting record gets so little press.

        But none of that matters. The dems "lose" to republicans, that doesn't change anything. The family business is still intact. The pendulum swing is by design. Wildly exaggerating the minutest differences keeps it going