I am beginning to think the Trump administration did not want citizenship data to enforce the Voting Rights Act

Leah Litman — the scholar best positioned to write this piece — observes that Trump’s attempts to unilaterally remove the 14th Amendment from the Constitution are further evidence about why the administration actually sought citizenship data in the Census:

On Tuesday, President Trump signed yet another executive order designed to solidify the political power of his white Republican base at the expense of members of minority groups: It would exclude undocumented immigrants from the census count used to apportion congressional seats.

The order appears to emphatically confirm what the Supreme Court concluded last summer in a blockbuster decision that forbade the administration from adding a citizenship question to the U.S. Census — namely, that the administration had “contrived” a rationale for that action. It did not want to collect citizenship information to enforce the Voting Rights Act, as it had maintained. (Throughout the litigation, the groups challenging the citizenship question argued that the administration really wanted citizenship information to allow states to draw districts based on the number of citizens rather than total population. The court did not embrace that interpretation, but did reject the administration’s descriptions of its motive.)

Trump is now pursuing another way to wield the census against noncitizens — confirming that the court was correct in finding the administration to be disingenuous in the earlier case. The administration will now try to figure out which people identified by the census are undocumented immigrants using information shared with the Commerce Department by other agencies. That Trump’s dishonesty on census-related questions is now crystal clear could doom this executive order as well — fairly quickly.

At this point, it’s worth going back to the truly unhinged opinion issued by Thomas and joined by Gorsuch and Kavanaugh in Department of Commerce v. New York, accusing the District Court judge of being a conspiracy theorist for finding that the assertion that citizenship data was necessary to better enforce the Voting Rights Act was a pretext:

The District Court’s lengthy opinion pointed to other facts that, in its view, supported a finding of pretext. I do not deny that a judge predisposed to distrust the Secretary or the administration could arrange those facts on a corkboard and—with a jar of pins and a spool of string—create an eye-catching conspiracy web. Cf. id., at 662 (inferring “from the various ways in which [the Secretary] and his aides acted like people with something to hide that they did have something to hide”). But the Court does not rely on this evidence, and rightly so: It casts no doubt on whether the Secretary’s stated rationale factored into his decision. The evidence suggests, at most, that the Secretary had multiple reasons for wanting to include the citizenship question on the census.

Projection is a hell of a drug! (As context, the total number of times the Trump administration has sued to enforce the Voting Rights Act is “none.”) And of course by this time the judge’s “conspiracy theory,” which was already obviously true, was backed up with dispositive documentary evidence. But the Roberts Court’s longstanding theory is that racism is a serious charge, so by definition no Republican can ever be guilty of it no matter what the record shows.