OPINION:
What a hullabaloo President Donald Trump’s decision to add a citizenship question back to the census survey has created.
And why?
Simply this: Because the left knows that illegals might fear filling out the census if they have to check off illegal on the citizenship box. And that means fewer dollars for Democratic leaning communities — as well as possibly, fewer Democratic voices in Congress.
The census, after all, serves a constitutional purpose of apportioning representatives and distributing tax dollars.
Article 1 Section 2 states, in part: “Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers. … The number of representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand.”
If illegals don’t fill out the census, then their voices won’t be counted for tax dollar disbursements, or for redistricting and determining the fair number of representatives for each district to send to the House.
So the criers on the sanctuary side and in the Big Government camp are trying hard to paint Trump as a discriminatory ogre, heck-bent on stifling the voices of the downtrodden citizenry — except, of course, these voices are neither downtrodden nor citizenry. They’re illegals who are riding, in some instances, free entitlement rides at the taxpayers’ expense.
Why should Americans pay for them to stay?
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, from the very liberal, very sanctuary-embracing state of California, has come out strong against Trump’s plans for the census, calling it an “assault on the foundations of this country” and characterizing it as an attack on “our democracy” — the latter, in itself, which is wrong, given America is a republic, or a democratic-republic, but never, never a democracy.
Nor did founders intend it to be.
But back to Feinstein. She wrote: “Given President Trump’s toxic rhetoric and aggressive policies toward immigrants, it’s clear his administration wants to include this question to discourage participation in immigrant communities.”
Umm — if they’re illegal, so what? Wouldn’t that be a good thing?
Feinstein also took to Twitter to blast Trump further, in Spanish, no less.
Translated to English, her tweet read in part: “The goal of the Trump administration is to limit the participation of certain people and to divide our communities.”
Her tweet linked to a piece she penned for LaOpinion — again, in Spanish. Democrata Dianne Feinstein, una senadora federal de California, as she signed her piece, is certainly on a mission to save the illegals from feeling frightened.
The campaign’s ridiculous — as is the one being pushed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which said the census citizenship question showed Trump’s racism. White supremacy, in fact.
“This is yet another political move by the Trump administration to implement its white supremacist agenda and to drag our nation back to the false ’white paradise’ of the 1950s,” CAIR said in a statement. “It is inevitable given the current environment that immigrants and their extended community networks will perceive this move as targeting them and their families for government action — including detention and deportation — thereby decreasing minority participation in the census.”
Here’s the question that’s so obvious it’s a wonder Trump’s census change has generated any controversy at all: Why wouldn’t the illegals just lie?
After all, they’re here illegally. They’re already breaking laws. They’re already pretending to be something they’re not — already bearing, in biblical terms, false witness. Yet checking a box on a census is where they draw the law-breaking line?
Let it go, left. The census question of citizenship used to be asked with regularity prior to the 1950s. It’s not the end of the world — and it’s certainly not going to be the end of illegals living in this country.
And on that second — too bad on that.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.
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