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New documents on the census confirm: Trump's raison d'etre is white power
Source: Washington Post
New documents on the census confirm: Trump’s raison d’etre is white power
By Dana Milbank
Columnist
May 31 at 3:41 PM
This week, the hood came off.
The Trump administration has devised a fundamentally racist policy: adding a question to the 2020 Census that will suppress participation by nonwhite people and, therefore, artificially increase white (and Republican) power in a new round of gerrymandering.
To do this, administration officials falsely told the public, the lower courts and the Supreme Court that the disadvantage to nonwhite Americans was statistically questionable and that the Justice Department needed the change to enforce the Voting Rights Act.
But documents released this week prove this all to be a ruse. Officials lied about their motives.
The documents, from the files of the late architect of the plan, show that this gerrymandering expert (Thomas Hofeller, whose role the Trump administration did not disclose to the courts) wrote a 2015 study saying his scheme (to use voting-age citizens for redistricting rather than total population) would require a “radical redrawing” of legislative districts that would “be advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.” This “would clearly be a disadvantage for the Democrats,” he wrote, packing Democratic voters into fewer districts and “strengthening the adjoining GOP districts.”
-snip-
By Dana Milbank
Columnist
May 31 at 3:41 PM
This week, the hood came off.
The Trump administration has devised a fundamentally racist policy: adding a question to the 2020 Census that will suppress participation by nonwhite people and, therefore, artificially increase white (and Republican) power in a new round of gerrymandering.
To do this, administration officials falsely told the public, the lower courts and the Supreme Court that the disadvantage to nonwhite Americans was statistically questionable and that the Justice Department needed the change to enforce the Voting Rights Act.
But documents released this week prove this all to be a ruse. Officials lied about their motives.
The documents, from the files of the late architect of the plan, show that this gerrymandering expert (Thomas Hofeller, whose role the Trump administration did not disclose to the courts) wrote a 2015 study saying his scheme (to use voting-age citizens for redistricting rather than total population) would require a “radical redrawing” of legislative districts that would “be advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.” This “would clearly be a disadvantage for the Democrats,” he wrote, packing Democratic voters into fewer districts and “strengthening the adjoining GOP districts.”
-snip-
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-census-scheme-exposed-a-lie-to-increase-white-power/2019/05/31/b6f40ef6-83b3-11e9-95a9-e2c830afe24f_story.html