Donald “Bonkers” Trump said today on the “sacred” grounds of the White House that reapportionment and allocation of federal funds needed to know who were citizens. (It’s odd, that we have done SIX census starting in 1960, reapportionment, and yearly federal allocations, without having a citizenship question on the census.) His statement of course, totally ignores the constitution which says to count all free people. The free refers to slaves, not just citizens, as Trump may want to pretend some day. Trump also said that only voting age adults who were citizens should be counted. It’s almost as if Trump had now also aborted all underage children from their inalienable right to being counted. Trump also implied that states could use the citizens or eligible voters count to allocate districts. Mathematically, that knowledge would help Republicans in states that are now free to gerrymander, in order to get more secure Republican districts. That is why Trump signed an order requiring all parts of the federal government to share their citizenship data to determine their distribution. This is a pretty blatant misuse of Presidential power to bias towards his party. But so, it turned out, was the citizenship question on the census. No, the President was not “defeated” today.
An enormous $675 billion of federal funds are directed according to population.
Even if Trump uses other means to find out who is a citizen in a district, he called it “needed information”, it cannot be substituted for or added to the official census count. Since Attorney General Barr was standing on Trump’s left without wincing, you can count on there being a lot of obviously unconstitutional actions by the DOJ and the Commerce Department, and subsequent countersuits that will take years to get a ruling from the Supreme Court.
Trump has said in the past that there were 30 million illegal immigrants in the US. The official number, which I think means the number from Trump’s Administration, is that there are only 11 million illegal immigrants, and 11 million legal residents, who are not citizens, totaling 22 million non-citizens. Trump never mentions the legal residents. What does that mean? Anyway, the 30 million is why I called him “bonkers”. It’s hard to imagine that Trump does not know the difference between these categories, since Trump married both Ivana and Melania before they became naturalized citizens.
Earlier today, Trump met at the White House with 200 of his main web backers on various social media. These might be where he got his number of illegals from. I don’t think that he caught a mental virus from these backers, since his over 10,000 lies preceded their contaminating the White House.
The fear induced by ICE raids on Sunday is going to be connected to the census by their discussion together on the news this week.
