The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in April about the Trump administration’s plan to include a citizenship question on the census — but significant information surfaced this past week indicating the federal government did so for political reasons. The daughter of a now-deceased Republican leader in district-map drawing discovered a hard drive of his past work, which contained evidence that the citizenship question was specifically crafted to give an electoral benefit to whites and Republicans. Is the citizenship question just a routine inquiry, as the administration has claimed, or racist? And how much will this new information matter, given the timing?
Jim Braude was joined by Iván Espinoza-Madrigal, the executive director of the Lawyers' For Civil Rights, and Peter Skerry, a political science professor at Boston College.
