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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.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 30 2019, @11:55PM (8 children)
Didn't the constitution say they get half a vote?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 31 2019, @12:07AM (7 children)
3/5ths. And they didn't get the vote. But none of that was in the Constitution naturally, it was only so Republicans had a chance of getting elected. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Fifths_Compromise [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 31 2019, @12:19AM (3 children)
Of course, women were counted and not allowed to vote until 1920. Indians were not even counted.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 31 2019, @12:44AM (1 child)
But Indians got casinos, so they did OK in the end.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Friday May 31 2019, @12:53AM
No, they actually got to vote! By virtue of the Snyder Act, on June 2, 1924. Casinos are just a backhanded insult to their limit sovereignty on their own nations, and a throwing of them to organized crime by Republicans and Jack Abramoff. [wikipedia.org] But that may be what you are saying.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 31 2019, @07:13AM
Black people? Come in. You forgot to include when darkies got the vote
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 31 2019, @02:01AM (1 child)
The Republican party did not exist until 1854; they were also (at that time) anti-slavery. [wikipedia.org] Next time, learn what you are talking about before hitting submit.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 31 2019, @07:01AM
Oh, shit, you outed me! Here I was equating the Whigs with the current Republican party, the ones that supported chattel slavery and genocide, the ones that were the Democrats in the post-bellum South, but then switched to the Republican party after Johnson's Civil Rights laws. You know, Racists. Fuck wads. Idiots, who think skin color gives them privilege. Republicans. But they are dying out, because they cannot find women stupid enough to reproduce with them. Mitch, after all, had to go Chinese.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Acabatag on Friday May 31 2019, @03:06AM
The 3/5 of a vote rule was something forced on the slave states by the North. The North didn't want the South to dominate, so they didn't want the large number of slaves in the south to give the Southern states more representatives in congress. At the time, women couldn't vote either.