Hey Baby, Come Here Often?

This hardly should be news, but it is confirmation of what we suspected:

Census Memo Cites ‘Unprecedented’ Meddling by Trump Administration

WASHINGTON — A newly disclosed memorandum citing “unprecedented” meddling by the Trump administration in the 2020 census and circulated among top Census Bureau officials indicates how strongly they sought to resist efforts by the administration to manipulate the count for Republican political gain.

The document was shared between three senior executives including Ron S. Jarmin, a deputy director and the agency’s day-to-day head. It was written in September 2020 as the administration was pressing the bureau to end the count weeks early so that if President Donald J. Trump lost the election in November, he could receive population estimates used to reapportion the House of Representatives before leaving office.

The idea being that if they screw around with the census numbers, they can then screw around with congressional districts. And lo! they did!

Most of those issues directly affected the population estimates used for reapportionment. In particular, the administration was adamant that — for the first time ever — the bureau separately tally the number of undocumented immigrants in each state. Mr. Trump had ordered the tally in a July 2020 presidential memorandum, saying he wanted to subtract them from House reapportionment population estimates.

…which is patently illegal. The census is really about counting noses, finding out where people are in a snapshot in time, regardless of their citizenship status. This also impacts how federal money gets sprinkled around (places with more people get more Ameros, duh).

Eff’ing with the Census is a different way of cooking the books, and let’s face it that is Hair Fürors core competency. See Jame, Letitia NY AG, she can explain why we say this.

Anyway the new congressional district maps are being drawn up around the country (and for the first time that I can remember California! lost congressional seats) and Republicans are making net gains, you can look to this rat-eff’ery as the root cause. We’re going to have a decade to suffer through the consequences.

Didn’t know mouths could get hemorrhoids.

Thanks a lot, asshole.