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NEW: The Supreme Court hears a case today on Trump's effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. A new analysis finds the question could deter 1 in every 8 Latinos from participating, & it would turbocharge extreme GOP gerrymandering (thread) dailykos.com/stories/2019/4…
The decennial census hasn't asked about citizenship status since 1950. The Trump admin claimed they needed the question to enforce the VRA, but three lower courts found that was a deceptive pretext. Plus, we already have citizenship estimates from the voluntary census ACS survey
Millions of people would likely be undercounted if the citizenship question is on the census. That alone would deprive urban areas & communities of color of their rightful representation & federal funding, shifting it to rural whites. But it gets far worse from there
Having citizenship data from the 2020 census, GOP-run states could redistrict based solely on the much-whiter adult citizen population instead of the norm of using the total population. The Supreme Court hasn't barred states from doing this, but they lacked hard data before now
Redistricting based on adult citizens instead of total population would have the impact of making maps that unfairly favor the GOP even more extremely unrepresentative, & it could make it impossible for Democrats to win control of a state like Texas even as it becomes much bluer
Without GOP gerrymandering, a hypothetical nonpartisan Texas congressional map like this one would enable the party that wins the statewide vote to win the most seats, & Latinos would likely hold several more seats. Trump & Cruz won just a 19-17 majority of seats 
Redistricting based on adult citizens instead of total population would make even non-gerrymandered Texas districts unfairly favor the GOP. That's because about 68% of people in GOP districts are adult citizens & just 58% in Dem ones, forcing the latter to expand to attain parity
This is also why those who claim "Dem clustering" is more responsible than gerrymandering are wildly off the mark for why districts across the US favor the GOP. Dem voters might be clustered, but Dem districts also have far more nonvoters than GOP ones, providing a counterbalance
If the Supreme Court lets Trump add a citizenship question to the census, it'd be devastating for fair redistricting, letting GOP-gerrymandered states pack millions more Dems & voters of color into fewer districts, ensuring white GOP control of states like Texas for years to come
America's electorate has never been less white. Trump's push to add a citizenship question to the census is solely intended to ensure that white Republicans maintain undeserved power via hyper-gerrymandered districts for years if not decades to come
Also this
This outcome would be an unmitigated catastrophe for fair representation in redistricting
This is only going to make the case for court-packing even stronger. The Trump administration's behavior in the census citizenship case was cartoonishly deceptive & illegal
Roberts letting Trump lie his way into adding a citizenship question to the census in order to rob people of color of their representation & give it to white Republicans would in many ways be far worse than gutting part of the Voting Rights Act in 2013
This & also Senate malapportionment. Democrats won more votes yet no majority for the combined classes of senators in 2014, 2016, & 2018. 2020 could be a repeat, after which the GOP could refuse to confirm any Dem president's nominees
This thread raises a good point: If Republicans had good-faith concerns over the impact of non-citizens on redistricting, they could support proportional representation. However, they don't, since the whole point of the citizenship case is to exacerbate gerrymandering, not end it
