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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, Interesting) by RandomFactor on Thursday May 30 2019, @11:39PM (2 children)

    by RandomFactor (3682) Subscriber Badge on Thursday May 30 2019, @11:39PM (#849492) Journal

    Hmmm, that might work also, but we would promptly get sliver thin runners everywhere to add layers to protected districts.

    The topology angle was that in the 1700's crossing a river, lake, mountain, gorge, etc. to get to a polling place was a significant hardship so district lines followed topology so that you would have an accessible polling place. That had value then. Now it does not.

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  • (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Thursday May 30 2019, @11:49PM (1 child)

    by krishnoid (1156) on Thursday May 30 2019, @11:49PM (#849503)

    I meant topology (mathematically, graph/edge/map theory) vs topographically (geographical features).

    • (Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Friday May 31 2019, @12:08AM

      by RandomFactor (3682) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 31 2019, @12:08AM (#849512) Journal

      errr, yes you did :-p

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