Dems vote to strengthen Census Bureau powers to try to block citizenship questions

The House passed legislation Thursday that would make the Census Bureau more independent from the White House, a move Democrats hope will prevent a future Republican president from adding census questions about citizenship.

Lawmakers passed the law to ensure a fair and accurate census thanks to near-unanimous support from Democrats who opposed former President Donald Trump’s failed push for a citizenship question in 2018 and remain concerned another Republican may try again.

Trump’s team argued that a citizenship question was needed to determine where non-citizens live, which would help the government enforce the Voting Rights Act. But the question was removed after the Supreme Court ruled that his administration did not properly justify the inclusion of this question.

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Republican opposition to the bill was not enough in the House, where Democrats, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have a slim majority, and the bill passed by a 220-208 vote.
(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Still, the decision leaves open the possibility that another Republican president could try to add it, and Democrats hope the bill passed Thursday would make that much more difficult.

The legislation gives more decision-making authority to the Census Bureau director, limits the number of political appointees at the bureau and requires the commerce secretary to certify that new questions added to the census are fully researched before they are included.

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It also says the Census Bureau director can only be removed for “inefficiency, dereliction of duty or misconduct in office,” another effort to make it harder for the White House to pressure the director.

Former President Donald Trump’s team argued that a citizenship question was needed to determine where non-citizens live, which would help the government enforce the Voting Rights Act.
(AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

Democrats who supported the bill saw Trump’s attempt as an improper use of political power over what was supposed to be an independent agency. Democrats wrote in report language accompanying the bill that a congressional investigation showed how “a group of political appointees sought to use the census to advance an ideological agenda and potentially exclude non-citizens from the apportionment count.”

On the floor this week, Democrats repeated that language, suggesting Trump’s team hoped the question would skew the census results and disrupt how the government uses census data to direct federal funds across states.

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“The Trump administration and its partisan Census Bureau undermined this critical task in March 2018 when it planned to add a citizenship question to the census that would have violated the Constitution and reduced response rates, and they knew it,” Rep. Gerry Connolly. D-Va., argued in the floor.

On May 21, 2020, a federal judge agreed to impose financial sanctions against the Trump administration for failing to produce hundreds of documents during litigation over whether a citizenship question could be added to the 2020 census.
(AP Photo/Paul Sancya, File)

Republicans responded that Democrats were doing their best to ensure that a citizenship question is never offered on the census again, even though previous versions of the census included it.

“The intent of this bill is clear,” said Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz. “It is to prevent a future Republican president from adding a question about citizenship to the United States census. And yet the question about citizenship was first offered by President Thomas Jefferson in 1800, and from its introduction in the census from 1820 to 1950, that question was included in every census.”

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In the committee’s report accompanying the legislation, Republicans argued that omitting the citizenship question will only end up “guaranteeing that future censuses will be unfair and inaccurate.”

Republican opposition to the bill was not enough in the House, where Democrats hold a slim majority, and the bill passed by a 220-208 vote. Passage sends the bill to the Senate, where Democrats face the difficult task of finding 10 Republican supporters to advance the bill.