You go Barbara!
The weaponization of the Voting Rights Act is beyond despicable. Thanks Chief Justice Roberts, you dick.
IANAL but this sure reads as fraud and perjury. Are those still crimes?
So, Ross straight up lied in his Congressional testimony…? Will this bring zero consequence??
I think it’s time for another foul spot to be removed from the cabinet.
It also begs the question, how much did he lie in Congressional testimony regarding his appointment to Commerce Secretary? I’d love to know what Mueller has regarding all that… (Bank of Cyprus money laundering, conflict holdings, etc.)
And I really don’t need to see that man’s face so up close and personal ever again. Talk about unpleasant…!
Making false statements to congress (under oath or not) is a federal offense punishable by up to five years in prison.
Huh. Has DOJ decided to stop covering for the administration? That would be an interesting development.
Previous document production showed that he and other bureau experts had assembled analyses finding that asking the citizenship question would be costly and would affect the census count, and that there are other ways to obtain the citizenship data the Justice Department was ostensibly requesting for Voting Rights Act enforcement.
Fraud.
Great reporting, Tierney. Terribly important, vastly under reported story.
Yet more evidence that yet another Trumpp cabinet member is a lying, greedy racist using the power of the office for partisan and/or personal gain.
Lying under oath to Congress? That’s perjury, right?
Not for Republicans. But it will be after November.
So now I would like to know why Ross, DoJ, DHS even thought of adding this question? Nobody wants to claim ownership of the “question,” why not?
was not necessary for addressing the Justice Department’s request for data for Voting Rights Act enforcement.
So what data does the DoJ need to enforce the VRA? Who over in the DoJ needed this information?
Except it wasn’t. Ross lied. Lock him up.
Its more like Ross and his goons at Commerce were shopping this around to anyone that would help them get this on the census as their #1 priority. They want desperately to mess with accurate population numbers, which could eventually mess with voter representation and lead to eventual defunding of various communities (more often Democratic strongholds) by specifically singling out immigrant participation in civic matters large and small. Obviously they preferred a legal rationale and justification for their manipulative efforts…which luckily did not happen…as yet. That doesn’t mean they still won’t try. If anything, Pukes are persistent in their attempts to get what they want by any underhanded means necessary.
Ross seems to have had a hard time taking “no” for an answer from the DoJ. Its also disturbing that someone at Justice told them they couldn’t do it only because they had to watch out for problems more having to do with “the whole Comey matter”, and didn’t want to draw further attention to their actions, but not because the matter itself was unethical and improper to begin with…which they should have told them was out-of-the-question. But that’s what happens when you decimate the Civil Rights Division at DoJ alongside these types of actions as Sessions et al have done.
By telling Congressional members that it was the DoJ that initiated the question of citizenship, it reminds me of that time Cheney and his goons shopped a story to the NYT (not exactly the same, but close enough) that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction so he could refer back to the story as if it had come from the Times’ own reporting in the first place to validate the need for active measures. We know now, Cheney did so in an effort to make the case to fraudulently sell the Iraq War to the country, when he had already set up the reasons deceptively by this outside reporting, rather than owning up to it based on the Bushies own desires and decision-making to move full steam ahead, regardless.
If certain assessments begins elsewhere as its genesis, it becomes easier to sell to others, covering up for the fact that the ideas are all planted as a justification, and are politically motivated to begin with. This is how bad actors in gov’t often overreach in their authority; getting the country to go along with their shenanigans and creating havoc in their wake.
Ross is a dishonest money-grubbing piece of shit. He should be in a retirement village somewhere eating applesauce and sucking on a few more lemons…preferably back on the island of Cyprus, far the fuck away from here. He sure as hell shouldn’t be in our government. How he ever got the votes to lead that agency is yet another shameful part of this maladministration.
Wilbur Ross manages to keep flying under the radar and has not received nearly enough attention for the evil piece of shit he is. He rivals Trump himself in his transparent greed and criminality. Is it because he looks like a senile accountant that he seems to survive unscathed?
So if congress can do a criminal referral for Steele, I think they might get around to doing one for Ross.
I agree that “Executive branch officials discussing important issues prior to formulating policy is evidence of good government," but this looks more like executive branch officials shopping for a shill to support its preconceived notion of what constitutes good government.
He also never fully divested his business assets upon entering government and he continues to lie about those. I think that he’s probably finding more ways than most to cash-in on tRump’s tariffs and trade war bullshit too. He’s despicable.
Ross is a real grifter, not some crass Trumpite…
He is as dirty as they come…
I think I can give you a piece of the puzzle. I’m not going to do a google-brand internet search to refresh my memory on this, so please forgive any errors.
Ever since “Justice” Roberts largely eliminated the prior restraints on the racists trying to suppress and corral minority voters, the GOP has been especially creative in thinking up new ways to maintain the power of whites in a country with a growing percentage of less-pale people.
As the GOP began to max out the gains it could get through redistricting based on total population in a district, it has considered some other bases for redistricting. For example: one GOPer filed a lawsuit claiming that his vote was diluted because his district had much higher voter turnout than a nearby district (which just happened to have a large percentage of minorities who leaned Democratic). His single vote, he argued, had less impact in his district than a single vote would have in the other district. He argued that the situation required remedy in the form of redistricting on the basis of votes cast. His position was ridiculous, and the suit got nowhere, but who knows what could happen in a court with multiple Trumpp appointees.
Another redistricting concept that got a little further (I think it had a state, maybe Texas, behind it) was to base districts on the number of citizens rather than the number of residents. Obama’s DOJ opposed this idea, and one of the arguments it raised was that, while it could evaluate redistricting compliance with the VRA when total population was the basis, it would not be able to determine the compliance of districts based on citizens. The Census data was not sufficient for the task.
The GOP is now grabbing onto that defense, twisting it, and making the argument that, for the sake of the VRA, we need full Census data on citizenship – even though districting subject to the VRA has all been based on total population and so doesn’t need any citizenship data.
Putting a Citizenship question on the regular Census form offers three benefits to the GOP: an undercount of population (including citizen population) in areas with a lot of immigrants, which would shift government resources and perhaps a few electoral votes toward red states; data that might let the GOP draw even more GOP-favorable maps without violating the VRA; and finer-grained data for targeting ICE enforcement sweeps.
My personal opinion is that the primary motivation for adding the Census question is to punish states that are immigrant-friendly.
O! say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
No. That land has suffered a serious injury. Take a knee.
Another liar in the Trump bAdministration; quelle surprise.