Missouri AG Catherine Hanaway sues over census to shift political power | Opinion
For her next act, Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway intends to convince a federal court that the U.S. Constitution doesn’t mean what it plainly says.
Why? To give Republicans more political power.
Hanaway last Friday announced she’s suing the U.S. Department of Commerce to force it to omit undocumented immigrants from the next U.S. census in 2030. She also wants the department to tear up the 2020 census that states relied on to draw their congressional maps and force everybody to start over without immigrants in the count.
Missouri would have received an extra seat in Congress if the 2020 count hadn’t included undocumented migrants, she said. Hanaway wants that seat — and the accompanying Electoral College vote — right now.
“The State of Missouri and its voters can no longer ignore the ongoing denial of their right to self-government and fair representation,” she said in a press release.
Sounds great. Only this isn’t about Missouri at all. Not really.
President Donald Trump and his GOP allies in Congress have been talking for months about upending the census and immediately forcing states to redraw their congressional maps, though legislation hasn’t gone anywhere. The whole idea is to shift a few more seats nationally to the GOP column and make it more difficult for Democrats to win elections.
That’s gerrymandering by other means.
The census push by Trump is an effort to “predetermine election outcomes so he can consolidate his power,” a Democratic official told NPR in August, “and avoid accountability to the American people.”
Hanaway, good Republican that she is, is happy to go along.
14th Amendment: Everybody counts
Here is where the Constitution comes in: The 14th Amendment says the census used to apportion Congressional representation shall count “the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.”
The language isn’t fuzzy. There are no other exceptions to the mandate, no distinctions between citizen and noncitizen. Everybody gets counted.
Hanaway’s argument is that migrants should be treated more like “temporary sojourners” — foreign tourists — who aren’t included in the census count because they “have no right to permanently remain where they are.”
Only it’s not that simple, is it?
A lot of the folks who come here, legally or otherwise, aren’t stopping in for a week or two. They’re joining and building communities, raising families and becoming the backbones of entire workforces. They build houses, pick crops and take care of your aging relatives.
Despite the president’s deportation push, it’s not clear all those folks are going anywhere even now. Trump has focused enforcement on Democratic cities such as Minneapolis, but pointedly avoided sending Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents into rural Republican-leaning farm communities, where migrants are known to cluster.
Funny, that.
Strip those folks out of the census count and you create problems. Those numbers are used to determine the distribution of SNAP benefits, community development block grants and federal school lunch funds. Not counting people doesn’t mean they don’t go away. It just means states and communities are left without sufficient resources.
That’s not Hanaway’s problem, apparently.
An ideological crusader
Hanaway has been in office for only a few months, but she’s already proven herself a prolific right-wing ideological crusader.
Just this week, she announced another new lawsuit, this time against the Missouri State High School Activities Association for discriminating against white men when choosing board members. (My colleague Toriano Porter noted in December that 70% of MSHSAA board members are already white men.)
And she’s been a remarkably aggressive defender of the Trump-backed gerrymandering effort to give Republicans the U.S. House seat now held Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver of Kansas City.
So there’s ample reason to be skeptical of the noble good-government stance Hanaway is striking in the new census lawsuit.
“In maintaining the American social compact between the People and their government,” the attorney general wrote in Friday’s filing, “nothing is more sacred than the People’s right to representation.”
Unless you’re a Democrat, apparently. Or a minority. Or a Kansas Citian.
Hanaway is consistent, though. She is for Republicans getting more power and everybody else getting less. The census lawsuit is just more of the same.
