The Trump administration’s controversial effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census was drawn up by the Republican Party’s gerrymandering mastermind, who wrote that it “would clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats” and “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.” This bombshell news, revealed in newly released legal documents, suggests that the Trump administration added the question not to better enforce the Voting Rights Act, as it claimed, but to benefit Republicans politically when it came to drawing new political districts.
A case challenging the citizenship question is currently before the Supreme Court, and the new evidence significantly undercuts the Trump administration’s position in the case.
Tom Hofeller, who passed away last year, was the longtime redistricting expert for the Republican National Committee. He helped Republicans draw heavily gerrymandered maps in nearly every key swing state after the 2010 election. In some of those places, like North Carolina, the new lines were struck down for discriminating against African Americans.
In 2015, Hofeller was hired by the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news outlet, to study the impact of drawing state legislative districts based on citizenship rather than total population, which has been the standard for decades. Hofeller’s analysis of Texas state legislative districts found that drawing districts based on citizenship—a move he conceded would be a “radical departure from the federal ‘one person, one vote’ rule presently used in the United States”—would reduce representation for Hispanics, who tended to vote Democratic, and increase representation for white Republicans. But Hofeller said that a question about citizenship would need to be added to the census, which forms the basis for redistricting, for states like Texas to pursue this new strategy.
Hofeller then urged President Donald Trump’s transition team to add the question about citizenship to the 2020 census. He urged the team to claim that a citizenship question was needed to enforce the Voting Rights Act, even though Hofeller had already concluded that it would harm the racial minority groups that the act was designed to protect. That argument was then used by the Justice Department in a December 2017 letter requesting that the Commerce Department, which oversees the census, include a citizenship question.
Hofeller’s documents were discovered on hard drives found by his estranged daughter and introduced into evidence in a separate trial challenging gerrymandered North Carolina state legislative districts drawn by Hofeller. On Thursday, lawyers challenging the citizenship question cited them in federal court. They suggest that members of Trump’s team may not have been fully forthcoming in their testimony under oath. Neither Trump transition team member Mark Neuman nor John Gore, the former assistant attorney general for civil rights who wrote the Justice Department letter, mentioned Hofeller’s involvement in the letter when they were deposed under oath as part of a lawsuit by New York and 17 other states challenging the citizenship question.
Yeah. And of course, Texas was a key to all this.
The filing includes a 2015 analysis by Hofeller that had been commissioned to demonstrate the effect that using the population of citizens who are of voting age, as opposed to total population, would have on drawing up legislative districts.
Hofeller detailed how the change would clearly be “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites” by using the Texas House as his case study. He detailed how the Hispanic population would drop in traditionally Democratic districts, which would then have to grow geographically to meet constitutional population requirements in redistricting.
The loss of Democratic-leaning districts would be most severe in areas with mostly Hispanic populations, such as South Texas, El Paso and the Rio Grande Valley, which would lose 2.6 state House districts, according to Hofeller’s analysis. The change would also cost Dallas County 1.7 districts and another 1.7 districts in Harris County and its suburbs.
If the Supreme Court had required such a change at the time of the study, it would have mandated a “radical redrawing of the state House districts,” Hofeller wrote. He noted that the traditionally Democratic districts in need of more population could pick up pockets of Democratic areas in adjacent Republican-held districts and ultimately shore up the GOP’s control across the state.
But that approach was unrealistic at that point, Hofeller wrote in his study, because the government did not compile the necessary citizenship information. And he admitted it was unlikely that the Supreme Court could be convinced to alter the population standard used to draw legislative districts.
“Without a question on citizenship being included on the 2020 Decennial Census questionnaire, the use of citizen voting age population is functionally unworkable,” Hofeller said.
This is a reference to the Evenwel lawsuit, which established that states had discretion in how they drew legislative districts, but did not opine on whether drawing them based on citizen population rather than plain old population was legal. And so here we are.
The Census lawsuits have been argued before the Supreme Court, where the five Republican Justices seem inclined to let the Trump administration break the law as they see fit. Rick Hasen thinks this should-be-a-blockbuster revelation will just make the SCOTUS Five that much more likely to go with Team Trump. Hey, remember how Jill Stein supporters – and Ralph Nader supporters before her – poo-poohed concerns about the makeup of the Supreme Court if another Republican President got to pick more Justices? Good times, good times. ThinkProgress and Daily Kos have more.
