White Nationalism + Lies

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/19/opinion/columnists/wilbur-ross-census-trump.html

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On March 22, Wilbur Ross — President Trump’s commerce secretary — appeared before a House committee. Before doing so, Ross took an oath to tell the truth.

It seems clear that he then told a straight-up lie.

“The Department of Justice, as you know, initiated the request for inclusion of the citizenship question,” Ross told the committee. He was referring to a much-debated question that the Trump administration was proposing to add to the 2020 census, asking people whether they were American citizens. The Commerce Department oversees the census. But the Justice Department, Ross claimed, “initiated” the question, because it believed that knowing where citizens lived could somehow help the federal government protect the voting rights of African-Americans.

Let’s first pause for a moment on the absurdity of that explanation. The Trump administration and other Republican leaders have been trying in recent years to make it harder for minorities to vote, by closing polling places where they live, reducing voting hours and adding stringent I.D. requirements. And now Ross was suggesting that Jeff Sessions’s Justice Department — as New York magazine’s Eric Levitz points out — actually cared deeply about black voter turnout.

All along, the real motivation for the citizenship question has been clear. Adding it would frighten some Latinos — including citizens — about responding to the census, worried that doing so could subject them to scrutiny from immigration authorities. An undercount of Latinos would then cause them to receive less political representation and federal funding — both of which are based on the census. Areas with few Latinos, which tend to lean Republican, would receive outsize Congressional power and outsize federal money.

So we have known for months that Ross’s testimony was, at best, misleading. In July, The Washington Post gave him “four Pinocchios.” This week, we got the documentation that he told an outright lie — when he claimed the Justice Department “initiated” the citizenship question.

Memos released as part of a legal case, brought by the New York State attorney general and others, showed that the Justice Department did not initiate the question. Officials at Justice expressly refused to do so, knowing it would bring bad publicity. As an aide to Ross wrote to him six months before his testimony, “Justice staff did not want to raise the question given the difficulties Justice was encountering in the press at the time (the whole Comey matter).”

Ross’s department then tried to persuade the Department of Homeland Security to request that the question be added, but it also declined. “Ultimately, the Justice Department did send a formal request to the Census Bureau in December 2017 for a question about citizenship status,” as Hansi Lo Wang of N.P.R. explains. “That happened, however, months after Ross and his staff first reached out to the department about the request.” The Justice Department didn’t initiate anything here.

I realize I’ve just walked through a fair amount of bureaucratic back story. So I want to be clear about the full picture: A member of the president’s cabinet oversaw a plan to reduce the political power of a specific ethnic group. Then he lied to Congress about doing so.

It’s almost a perfect distillation of the Trump political philosophy: A mix of white nationalism and falsehoods.

More commentary on the census story: “Lies are not an appropriate mechanism by which to add a question to a survey,” wrote the survey expert Natalie Jackson. The political scientist Daniel Drezner noted, “In a normal administration this would be page A1 news and Ross would have had to resign by the end of the week for lying to Congress.”

Storms. Both Florence in the Carolinas and Super Typhoon Mangkhut, which hit parts of the Philippines, Hong Kong and southern China last week, show the disproportionate impact of natural disasters on poor communities, notes The New Republic’s Emily Atkin.

“While both were life-threatening storms, the greatest destruction and loss of life was in poor, remote locations,” she writes. As climate change worsens such storms, the “developed world’s emissions will be responsible for these changes. But it’s the developing world that may suffer the most from it.”

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