Later this year, the U.S. Supreme Court is going to decide on the constitutionality of President Trump's request that a citizenship question be placed in the 2020 U.S. Census.
Democrats know the 2020 Census citizenship question likely passes constitutional muster; like everything else constitutional, that's why they're fiercely objected to it, citing "privacy" concerns – a concern a federal judge, earlier this month, rejected.
So what's the real reason they're opposed to a citizenship question?
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Democrats know that states are blue or purple; they want to pad the stat sheet in the swing states. States' electoral votes, as well as future federal funding, are determined by their population totals. Having illegals and non-citizens counted in our Census means that swing states' electoral votes will increase, as they did for several swing states between the 2000 and 2010 Censuses.
The issue is never the issue
TRENDING: With a straight face ...
"The issue is never the issue," as "Rules for Radicals" author Saul Alinsky once remarked, and the Census, illegal immigration and non-citizen unholy trinity is no different.
After the 2010 Census, Texas gained four U.S. House of Representative seats; it's worth noting that Texas has had gains after every Census since it joined the Union in 1845. Florida, after the 2010 Census, gained two seats; like Texas, Florida was admitted into the Union in 1845 and has also seen its electoral votes increase after every Census.
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Reliably Democratic states such as Illinois, Massachusetts and New Jersey each lost a seat following the 2010 Census, and New York lost two; undoubtedly, Democrats, usually guaranteed those states' electoral votes, would like to see gains there after the 2020 Census.
Electoral vote allocations from the 2010 Census expire after the 2020 elections; 2020 data will determine electoral votes from 2022-2032.
Do Democrats want the question included because they care about illegal aliens and legal non-citizens having representation, or, because they care about counting bodies in swing states, including historically red states that are trending purple, such as Texas and Florida?
Democrats' options are limited
Give the Democrats credit: Even after over 1,000 losses in national and state elections during President Obama's two terms, they never stopped playing the long game. They understand that the cyclical nature of politics means that more electoral votes in swing states and guaranteed Democratic states puts them possibly in a strong position, long-term – especially considering the U.S.'s projected population demographics, which potentially benefit Democrats.
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The Democrats have three plays:
- While the Democrats would happily abolish our Electoral College, if given the opportunity, they know that's not going to happen.
- Democrats are fervently obstructing the confirmation hearings for 68 of President Trump's federal judicial nominees because they know they've lost ground in the judiciary. Making matters worse for the Democrats, Trump not only saw both his U.S. Supreme Court nominees confirmed, he also set a record for most appellate judges confirmed in a president's first two years. Why has the judiciary been so crucial to past Democrat success? Because of Trump's and Trump supporters' glass-ceiling shattering 2016 presidential win, Democrats' ability to legislate from the bench, via activist federal judges and SCOTUS justices, has been greatly hindered.Democrats know the majority of people in the majority of states don't want their political product; in the past, they could rely on sycophantic judges to force freedom-infringing laws upon Americans who didn't democratically choose them. It's not that our federal courts still don't contain a surfeit of activist judges (the GOP rarely opposed, en masse, Obama's federal judicial nominees), but their stranglehold is being challenged.
- Keep flooding the country with bodies, and make sure to account for the ones already here. (Open-borders Tessio Republicans – named after Sal Tessio, from "The Godfather," who intentionally betrays the Corleone family – have never put up much of a fight.)
Are there "only" 11 million illegal aliens in the U.S.? Doubtful. Those academic bastions of "right-wing thought," Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tab the illegal population at 22 million. Combine them with the 13 million non-citizen green-card holders, and that's an overnight 10 percent population increase that would influence the next apportioning of electoral votes.
Do we really think those tens of millions of illegal aliens and non-citizens are living in rural Nebraska, Alabama or Kentucky? Of course not; they're residing in hopelessly Democratic states, and big cities in red states – thereby rendering those red states purple. And guess what two swing states are home to the largest illegal-alien populations? Yup, you guessed it: Texas and Florida, with 1.6 million and 775,000, respectively. Remember: those are the ones we know about. If Texas Republicans don't like the swing-state label, then they need to up their game and stop producing one of the lowest turnout rates amongst all states. Turning Texas blue is the Democrats' Electoral College raison d'être.
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Textually, the Constitution is somewhat ambiguous regarding the citizenship question. The question, however, that will likely sway a majority of justices is: Did our founders want illegals and non-citizens determining electoral votes, federal funding and congressional apportioning?
The slow creep, by the way, of allowing illegals to vote in local and school board elections is underway.
The Democrats have utterly and abjectly lost the illegal-immigration argument. Their zealous remonstrance to the citizenship question is just another exhibit of evidence.