| Washington, June 27, 2019 “This decision confirms the Trump administration has been flagrantly deceitful in their public justifications for adding a citizenship question to the U.S. Census in 2020.”Today Congresswoman Wasserman Schultz issued the following statement on the Supreme Court’s decision in Department of Commerce v. New York:“This decision confirms the Trump administration has been flagrantly deceitful in their public justifications for adding a citizenship question to the U.S. Census in 2020.The Court’s decision today further exemplifies that this citizenship question has been a sham from the beginning, intended to weaponize the Census to deny political power, representation, and necessary federal resources to communities of color and immigrant communities. This would directly harm Broward and Miami-Dade counties.Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross testified before the Oversight Committee in March and told us, under oath, that the citizenship question was being added solely at the request of the Department of Justice to help enforce the Voting Rights Act.The Supreme Court wrote, ‘the VRA enforcement rationale—the sole stated reason—seems to have been contrived’ and called the Trump administration’s explanation ‘incongruent with what the record reveals about the agency’s priorities and decisionmaking process.’If Secretary Ross claims, following this decision, that there is a different rationale for the Commerce Department adding this question, he would be contradicting his previous sworn testimony before Congress.The Census is a sacred Constitutional duty, not a partisan endeavor. I urge the Census Department to cease pursuing this dangerous citizenship question immediately and stop advancing their true goal – undercounting people of color and immigrants.” |
