“Executive branch officials discussing important issues prior to formulating policy is evidence of good government,” a department spokesman, Kevin Manning, said at the time.
The committee was expected on Wednesday to mark up a bill to enhance the institutional independence of the Census Bureau in order to prevent political interference in the agency.
The report on Wednesday cites multiple drafts of an August 2017 memo about the citizenship question prepared by James Uthmeier, a political appointee and lawyer at the Commerce Department, that show him initially expressing skepticism and eventually forceful support for inclusion of the question.
“Over two hundred years of precedent, along with substantially convincing historical and textual arguments suggest that citizenship data likely cannot be used for purposes of apportioning representatives,” Mr. Uthmeier said in an early memo.
In later drafts, Mr. Uthmeier and another political appointee, Earl Comstock, altered or removed language that said that adding a citizenship question was likely to be illegal and unconstitutional, the investigators found.
“Ultimately, we do not make decisions on how the data should be used for apportionment, that is for Congress (or possibly the president) to decide,” Mr. Uthmeier said in a later email to Mr. Comstock, to which a revised memo was attached.
Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/20/us/census-citizenship-question-oversight.html
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