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Trump on why he wants a citizenship question: "You need it for congress for districting, you need it for appropriations." Key point: The Solicitor General specifically this was not why they wanted a citizenship question. This is the real reason that they've been hiding.
2/ Proud to say our team and especially @Tierney_Megan and @TPM_dk have been on this story abt as aggressively and as early as really any other pub. The reason for for this question is because on several fronts it helps dilute the voting power of Democrats and people of color.
3/ There's actually several ways it does this. But the central one is that it lays the groundwork for a big GOP wish-list item: drawing districts on the basis of citizens rather than residents in a district. States get allotted representatives based on residents. They also ...
4/ create districts on the basis of residents. The allocation is really clear cut. But GOPs want and SCOTUS has left open the possibility that drawing the districts themselves could be created on the basis of citizens. Why does this matter? Well consider this example.
5/ Take a state like Texas. Texas gets House seats on the basis of residents. They now have 36 reps. Let's say in the next census they get 40. So Texas gets credit for non-citizen residents. But if they can create the districts on the basis of citizens only then they can ...
6/ dramatically reduce the electoral clout of cities and increase the electoral clout of rural areas, also dramatically reduce the electoral clout of non-whites since POC and recent immigrants (who tend to more POC than white) are more concentrated in cities.
7/ They adding the question is the first step in cueing this up as the next big GOP legal push to entrench GOP electoral power regardless of public opinion. It also has the advantage of making the Census less accurate since people who are not citizens are less likely ...
8/ to fill out the form. Where all of this matters in terms of this quote is that the DOJ and Commerce have needed to lie about this being the reason. But here Trump says pretty clearly that that is the reason.
