Biden EO Will Officially End Trump’s Bid To Weaponize Census Data To Boost GOP Power

Soon after he is sworn into office, President-elect Joe Biden will reverse President Trump’s most aggressive moves to hijack the 2020 census, according to a preview of executive orders Biden will sign laid out by his advisors Tuesday evening.

Among the orders that Biden will sign Wednesday is a census executive order that will rescind”Trump’s plan, announced in July, to exclude certain immigrants from the census population counts used for congressional apportionment. The order will also undo a 2019 Trump order directing the Census Bureau to produce data on noncitizens, with the aim of facilitating a redistricting overhaul that would have also diminished immigrant political power.

Trump’s approach to the census data “violates the constitution and the Census Act and is inconsistent with our nation’s history and our commitment to representative democracy,” Susan Rice, Biden’s incoming domestic policy chief, told reporters on a call Tuesday.

“President Biden will ensure that the Census Bureau has time to complete an accurate population count for each state,” she said. “He will then present to Congress an apportionment that is fair and accurate so that federal resources are efficiently and fairly distributed over the next decade.”

The Trump apportionment policy was the capstone of the administration’s four-year crusade to manipulate the census to boost Republicans’ electoral advantages.

Had President Trump been able to implement the policy before he left office, it stood to shift House seats away from immigrant-rich parts of the country, while boosting the congressional representation for whiter, more reliably-Republican regions.

There was widespread doubt about the policy’s legality — the Supreme Court punted on the initial round of legal challenges brought against the July memo — and the administration ran into significant logistical challenges in trying to implement it as well, leaving Biden with the opportunity to reverse it.

The incoming Biden team has a host of executive actions planned for the early days of his presidency. The priority they’ve put on reversing Trump’s census moves on day one is reflective of both how the census timeline has crashed into the transfer of power and of the major stakes of the data that the decennial survey produces.

Congressional apportionment typically happens in early January in the year after the decennial census. The pandemic disrupted those plans for the 2020 census and the Census Bureau, with Trump’s support, asked Congress for four extra months to deliver the data. Around the time that Trump announced his anti-immigrant apportionment policy, the White House reversed on giving the bureau an extended schedule. The administration instructed the bureau to severely truncate the final phases of the census so that the data would be delivered more quickly, presumably so that Trump would still be in office to implement the policy even if Biden won the election.

The move to speed up the survey raised serious concerns about the accuracy of the data it would produce, while prompting a court fight. The gambit was also ultimately unsuccessful. The bureau still ran into delays — some of them pandemic-related, some of them products of the administration-ordered rush job — that prevented it from releasing the data before the inauguration.

In addition to changing the congressional apportionment base, the Trump administration appeared interested in using the noncitizen data to facilitate an overhaul of how legislative maps are drawn. Currently, redistricting is based on total population, but conservative activists have long sought to draw maps that would equalize districts based on the number of voting age citizens. That change, too, would increase the electoral power of white, rural Republican voters, to the detriment of communities of color.

The collection of the data, which was being assembled using existing government records, was recently halted by Census Bureau Director Steve Dillingham, who is facing an inspector general probe over the pressure he and other Trump appointees put on the bureau experts to rush out a report on the data before Biden was sworn in.

Dillingham, whose term doesn’t end until December, announced Monday that he is stepping down with Biden’s inauguration. The Biden team has not revealed its thinking on how it will fill the vacancy, which for now will be occupied in an acting capacity by the bureau’s top career official.

Hallelujah

If you didn’t see the COVID memorial service this evening – part of Joe Biden’s larger inauguration program – you really should. It is remarkable, simply remarkable that we are almost a year into this horrible epidemic and this is the first national memorial or commemorative service honoring, remembering the dead.

It is a remarkable and a devastating commentary. I did not quite grasp this absence until I saw it. We’ve fought so much over this epic calamity. We’ve seen so much deflection, blame-shifting and lies. Biden’s comments, remarkably brief, were a reminder that much of what we need is in silence, remembering and memorializing this catastrophic loss. We are now at more than 400,000 Americans dead, roughly the total number of fatalities over almost four years of World War II.

The brief program included two songs: Amazing Grace and Hallelujah.

This quiet, devastating and hopeful memorial reminded me of the remarkable and wholly improbable journey of this song, Hallelujah, into something like a canonical song of memorial or pathos in American culture. That this should be so is actually quite odd, not least because it is not at all clear what the song, in its totality, is even about. And a number of things the song is quite clearly about … well, they are not what you’d expect in a song now treated as appropriate, uplifting and fitting for all occasions and audiences.

Mainstream or memorial versions commonly expurgate the song’s erotic imagery. But it can’t all be ironed out. This energy, rumbling rough under the simplified lyrics, gives a power and ballast even to the more sanitized versions. In any case the mixing and matching of lyrics is possible because Leonard Cohen wrote numerous different lyrics for the song. You can mix and match them and create your own version.

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One Day Until An Unprecedented Inauguration: Live Updates

President-elect Joe Biden will be sworn into office one day from now, amid a backdrop of tension and unrest, not just in the nation’s capital, but across the country.

From heightened security measures put in place to protect the ceremonious affair following the insurrection of the Capitol just two weeks ago to accommodations put in place to prevent the spread of COVID-19, to the first Black and Asian American woman being sworn in as vice president — inauguration will be unprecedented in many ways.

We’ll be following all the ins and outs of the affair over the course of the next 24 hours-plus in our liveblog. Follow along below:

Not Another ‘Bipartisan’ Panel: GOP Could Help Fix Democracy By Not Undermining Elections To Begin With

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

A conservative U.S. senator from one of the most gerrymandered states in the nation is suddenly eager to restore confidence in the integrity of our elections. Sen. Rob Portman (OH) is certain that both Democrats and Republicans will want to work together toward his solution. 

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With Georgia Certification Complete, Ossoff And Warnock Are Set To Be Sworn In

Georgia’s secretary of state announced Tuesday afternoon that the runoff elections have been officially certified, clearing the way for Sens.-Elect Jon Ossoff (D-GA) and Raphael Warnock (D-GA) to be sworn in on Wednesday.

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Signs

Mitch McConnell’s remarks today about Trump’s role in the insurrection on their face make it pretty clear he believes Trump’s guilty of impeachable offenses which merit removal from office and a ban on serving again in the future. Whether he would vote that way is another question. I think there’s basically no way he does not if he’s not certain of at least 17 other Republican senators ready to join him.

But there’s one thing that’s worth noting about this impending trial.

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Bartiromo Keeps Up Trumpy Lie: Dems Dressed Up In MAGA Gear And Attacked Congress!

The Fox Business Network host Maria Bartiromo will reportedly soon be getting a chance to audition for a primetime Fox News slot. And based on her performance Monday morning, telling fantasyland stories about the mob that attacked the Capitol may just be part of the job. 

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Insurrection And Threat Of Right-Wing Violence Hang Over First Biden Nominee Hearings

As the first batch of President-Elect Joe Biden’s nominees faced their confirmation hearings Tuesday, reminders of the recent Capitol invasion and ransacking loom both inside and outside the building. 

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Pompeo, Who Celebrated His Own Italian Roots, Roasted For Tweet Opposing ‘Multiculturalism’

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Tuesday pandered to an increasingly mainstreamed brand of white nationalism and railed against the nation’s multicultural underpinnings by attacking “all the -isms” which he declared on his final full day as the nation’s top diplomat “make us weaker.”

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