Deceased G.O.P. Strategist's Hard Drives Reveal New Details on the Census Citizenship Question

[CousinIT]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/us/census-citizenship-question-hofeller.html

WASHINGTON — Thomas B. Hofeller achieved near-mythic status in the Republican Party as the Michelangelo of gerrymandering, the architect of partisan political maps that cemented the party’s dominance across the country.

But after he died last summer, his estranged daughter discovered hard drives in her father’s home that revealed something else: Mr. Hofeller had played a crucial role in the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

Files on those drives showed that he 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.

Those documents, cited in a federal court filing Thursday by opponents seeking to block the citizenship question, have emerged only weeks before the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the legality of the citizenship question. Critics say adding the question would deter many immigrants from being counted and shift political power to Republican areas.

The disclosures represent the most explicit evidence to date that the Trump administration added the question to the 2020 census to advance Republican Party interests.

[bronxiteforever]

1. Kick and recommend.

[CousinIT]

2. GOP operative on 2020 census citizenship ?: It "would clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats"

Link to tweet

New docs show that architect of GOP gerrymandering was behind Trump's push to add citizenship question to 2020 census, said it "would clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats” & “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic
Whites” (link: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6077715-May-30-2019-Letter-to-Judge-Jesse-Furman.html) documentcloud.org/documents/6077

[dalton99a]

3. "Don't reveal more than necessary", "Emails are the tool of the devil"

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/obituaries/thomas-hofeller-republican-master-of-political-maps-dies-at-75.html

But later, as the leading Republican drafter of partisan maps, he became their advocate, educating party activists in the art and importance of skillfully drawn boundaries. His PowerPoint presentation won a reputation for what came to be called “Hofellerisms,” slides that issued sometimes-hokey advice like “Don’t get cute, remember, this IS legislation!” “Don’t reveal more than necessary” and “Emails are the tool of the devil.”

Mr. Hofeller practiced what he preached. In 2017, deposed under oath in a federal lawsuit challenging his North Carolina House maps, he left prosecutors empty-handed when they sought evidence of the instructions state Republicans had given him.

“There were no instructions given to you in writing?” they asked.

“No,” Mr. Hofeller replied.

“There’s no paper trail against which we can evaluate your description of the instructions?”

“I don’t believe so, no.”

“But you advised them not to give you instructions in writing, to do so orally?”

“I don’t recollect that,” Mr. Hofeller said.