Fight to vote: Biden moves to fix US census less than 24 hours after taking office

[muriel_volestrangler]

On Wednesday, the president signed an executive order blocking the Census Bureau from excluding undocumented immigrants from the apportionment data used to determine how many seats in Congress each state gets. The move essentially ends a years-long effort by the Trump administration to get the Census Bureau to collect citizenship data that states could in turn use to diminish the political power of immigrants. The United States has long followed the constitutional mandate to apportion seats based on “the whole numbers of persons in each state”, and civil rights groups aggressively challenged the measure in court.

“I thunderously applaud the Biden administration’s action on day one to rescind the Trump’s administration’s directive to compile data on non-citizens for partisan purposes. While legal challenges and logistical challenges never allowed the directive to have its effect, it marred the 2020 census,” said Arturo Vargas, CEO of the Naleo educational fund.

As NPR noted, Biden’s order does not address separate instructions from Wilbur Ross, the former commerce secretary, ordering the Census Bureau to produce block level citizenship data states could use for redistricting if they want. Drawing districts based only on the voting eligible population, not all voters, “would be advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites,” a top GOP redistricting strategist wrote in 2015.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/21/fight-to-vote-newsletter-joe-biden-inauguration

Biden's executive action, however, does not address standing directives issued by now-former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who ordered the bureau to use the records to generate anonymized, block-level data about the U.S. citizenship status of every adult living in the country. It is not clear what will happen to the records the bureau has compiled and any data it has produced.

A GOP strategist concluded that data "would be advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites" when political mapmakers redraw state and local voting districts, a process that is set to begin again this year. The Census Bureau's public information office did not immediately respond to NPR's questions about the current status of the citizenship data project.

The project is currently facing an ongoing federal lawsuit led by attorneys with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Asian Americans Advancing Justice - AAJC.

https://www.npr.org/sections/inauguration-day-live-updates/2021/01/20/958376223/biden-to-end-trump-census-policy-ensuring-all-persons-living-in-u-s-are-counted

Since I couldn't see a thread that noted it in particular.

[Turbineguy]

1. Do the census over

send the bill to trump. He can collect from his rubes to pay for it.

[marble falls]

2. One home run after another.