The administration’s latest power grab is disguised as boring technical guidance.
Catherine Rampell at The Bulwark, via Brian Tyler Cohen:
A vaguely ominous but little-noticed regulatory filing issued in late June could have a profound impact on business, immigrants, and the balance of power in our country.
The filing was a notification that the Trump administration had drafted new rules governing the decennial census. The actual specifics of those new rules remain scant. But from conversations I’ve been having with people close to the process, it is widely expected that the administration will try to recategorize millions of immigrants (both unauthorized and legal) as not actually living here in the United States.
Why would they do that? For several reasons.
The first is a longstanding animus that the president and his top aides have to the immigrant population. The administration has unleashed unprecedented border crackdowns and interior enforcement measures, in the service of a vast project of mass deportation. Through the census, it can continue the spirit of that campaign. Put another way: If you can’t deport every immigrant, you can at least remove evidence they exist.
The second is power.
An “actual Enumeration” of the entire U.S. population is required by the Constitution’s Census Clause. It’s pretty clear that the Constitution requires counting the full population, based on the use of the word “Persons” in this spot in the original text (rather than “Citizens” as used elsewhere), and similar language—“the whole number of persons”—in the Fourteenth Amendment.1
The resulting census is hugely important to the functioning of our government. It determines how many congressional representatives each state gets and how districts are drawn. It thereby also affects how many votes each state has in the Electoral College process used in presidential elections. And it plays a role in how trillions of federal dollars are allocated each year, since census data are used to calculate funding levels for health care programs, nutrition, highways, housing, school lunches, etc.
The stakes, in other words, are incredibly high. Which makes this rules submission process so profoundly important.
And here’s the kicker: So far, virtually no one has noticed.2
Let me warn you that this issue gets a little weedy. That’s by design; the administration wants you to not understand what they’re doing, so you won’t notice you’re being disenfranchised and robbed until it’s too late.
What MAGA learned in Trump 1.0
Let’s be clear: President Trump has been trying to ratfuck the census for years.
Most of the time, though, he has failed. You may recall that in his first term, he tried to jam a last-minute question about citizenship into the 2020 census. The administration claimed this was necessary to help the Department of Justice enforce federal voting rights laws. But that was BS; files discovered on a dead GOP operative’s computer revealed that the real reason was politics.
This consultant had written a secret study determining that a citizenship question “would clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats” while being “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites” during the redistricting process. The Census Bureau’s own senior staff likewise pointed out that adding the question would intimidate Latinos (and other minorities) into not participating, leading to major population undercounts. This is a problem because participation is supposed to be mandatory—that’s how you get “the whole number of persons.”
Ultimately the Supreme Court blocked the citizenship question in 2019, saying the government’s rationale was clearly “contrived” and “pretextual.”
But importantly, the justices didn’t say this question could never be added, only that the government needed to do a better job of dotting its i’s and crossing its t’s. Or hiding its i’s and obscuring its t’s, as it were: Trump officials had been a little sloppy in showing their partisanship and racism.
Trump 2.0 has been different: Just as partisan and racist, but far more professionalized.
Even before taking office, the current administration developed a playbook in Project 2025 (which prioritizes adding a citizenship question to the 2030 census, among other changes to the decennial count). After Trump’s win, his team hired an army of loyalists who understood pesky bureaucratic obstacles like the Administrative Procedure Act, which tripped them up so many times in Trump’s first term (including in that failed attempt to add a citizenship question).
[...]
You see, some red states have sued the Department of Commerce (which administers the census) because they also want immigrants to be excluded from the decennial census, and they want federal courts to make it happen. The states argue that counting everyone who’s foreign-born in the official census unfairly ends up apportioning more congressional seats to states with bigger immigrant populations.7
And literally the day after the Trump administration filed that OMB regulatory notice, it asked a judge to pause one of these ongoing lawsuits. Why? Because Trump was . . . maybe about to do something that would make the lawsuits brought by those red states moot.
According to the court filing, the Trump administration has “reached a significant stage of the rulemaking process for a 2030 Residence Rule . . . which may ultimately obviate or significantly narrow many of the issues at the heart of this litigation.”
Again, we do not know what this not-yet-public rule actually says. But we do know what the states’ demands are.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit that Trump officials were responding to—a case filed by Missouri—had requested a ruling that would exclude “illegal aliens and temporary visa holders” from being counted in the census. As examples of “temporary visa holders,” the plaintiffs included people in the country on student visas or temporary work visas, according to Lauren Miller Karalunas, a lawyer with the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program.
In another case filed by a group of states and led by Louisiana, the plaintiffs similarly asked the judge to rule that the census should exclude “illegal aliens and aliens holding temporary visas.” Once again, the implication was anyone who doesn’t have a green card.
The Trump Regime has dastardly plans to rig the Census (and consequently reapportionment of Congressional seats and federal funding) by seeking to reclassify millions of immigrants-- regardless of their legal status-- as not actually living here in the United States.
In 2016, a 17-year-old Italian student received a 15-day suspension for selling cheap snacks to classmates without permission. His small business became national news and reportedly brought him several job offers. The Luigi Einaudi Foundation also gave him a scholarship, saying his business spirit should be encouraged rather than punished.
So, having started a war with Iran for reasons that didn’t make sense, Donald Trump, using tactics disconnected from any likely to achieve credible goals in Iran, first threatened to wildly escalate the war before deciding it was over and making up a ceasefire. Now, having restarted that war for reasons that don’t make any sense using tactics that are disconnected from any credible goals, Trump has both threatened wild escalation of the renewed war *and* decided not to escalate in the space of 24 hours.
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