To no one’s surprise, a San Francisco district court judge in the Ninth Circuit ruled Wednesday that the Trump administration cannot add a question about citizenship to the U.S. Census because it “threatens the very foundation of our democratic system.”
Judge Richard Seeborg determined that such a question would result in an undercount of immigrants due to their fear that the information would be used against them. This would, he ruled, result in lost congressional seats for districts like…well, like the one he resides in, where illegal immigrants are for some reason treated the same as citizens for the purposes of federal representation.
If the Trump administration challenges the ruling, the case will head to the infamous Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has made a sport out of handing out unfavorable (and often overturned) rulings against this president. We have little doubt about how such an appeal will go. That would potentially send the case to the Supreme Court, where we might finally get a ruling composed of sanity and law, but that depends on Trump’s eagerness to fight the ruling in the first place. Frankly, we think it’s a fight worth having.
The left’s insistence that illegal immigrants and Latinos will refuse to take the Census due to their fears is, in our way of thinking, not a valid reason to reject the question. There is nothing actively preventing them from taking the Census as normal, and there is no hard evidence to prove that they won’t. So to dismiss the question on that flimsy basis strikes us as entirely outside the law.
Second point: The left has said that the purpose of the Census is to count up every individual in the United States, and we don’t disagree with them on that. However, we unquestionably have a vested interest in knowing which of those people are citizens and which are not. There is no constitutional mandate for non-citizens to enjoy representation at the federal level as far as we can tell. So if the argument if that illegal-heavy districts will lose a seat at the Washington table, all we can say is: Well, that’s a good reason to make sure your district doesn’t fill up with illegal aliens!
Finally, there may be no more important purpose to the 2020 Census than determining exactly how many illegal immigrants are currently living in the United States. And frankly, we have a good idea that this is exactly why the left is fighting so hard to keep it off the books. They aren’t afraid of an undercount of the population – they are afraid of an accurate count of the population. Specifically, the illegal population. Dollars to doughnuts, it’s larger than that “11 million” number they’ve been throwing at us for the past decade. Much larger.
That’s what they want to keep hidden from the American people. By which we mean the American people.
