Kansas reporter slams red state AG’s push to ignore the Constitution for Trump

Kansas City Star correspondent Joel Mathis says the fledgling attorney general of Missouri is quickly going about the business of excluding certain Missouri populations to boost the Republican Party and President Donald Trump.

“For her next act, Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway intends to convince a federal court that the U.S. Constitution doesn’t mean what it plainly says,” said Mathis.

Last Friday Hanaway announced she’s suing the U.S. Department of Commerce to force it to omit certain populations from the next U.S. census in 2030. She also wants the department to “tear up” the 2020 census that states relied on to draw their congressional maps and force everybody to start over without immigrants in the count, according to Mathis.

“… [N]othing is more sacred than the People’s right to representation,” the attorney general wrote in her Friday’s filing.

“Unless you’re a Democrat, apparently. Or a minority. Or a Kansas Citian,” added Mathis.

Her argument is the state of Missouri would have received an extra seat in Congress if the 2020 count hadn’t included undocumented migrants, who added to population counts in other states and subsequently helped them outcompete Missouri for a new seat.

“The State of Missouri and its voters can no longer ignore the ongoing denial of their right to self-government and fair representation,” Hanaway said in a press release.

That sounds good on paper, said Mathis, but “this isn’t about Missouri at all.”

It’s about taking away votes from blue states and packing them off to red states like Missouri.

“President Donald Trump and his GOP allies in Congress have been talking for months about upending the Census and immediately forcing states to redraw their congressional maps, though legislation hasn’t gone anywhere,” said Mathis. “The whole idea is to shift a few more seats nationally to the GOP column and make it more difficult for Democrats to win elections. That’s gerrymandering by other means.”

The Census push by Trump is an effort to “predetermine election outcomes so he can consolidate his power,” a Democratic official told NPR in August, “and avoid accountability to the American people.”

Hanaway, is happy to go along, said Mathis. But Hanaway’s problem is with the 14th Amendment, which still decrees that the Census used to apportion Congressional representation shall count “the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.”

“The language isn’t fuzzy,” said Mathis. “There are no other exceptions to the mandate, no distinctions between citizen and noncitizen. Everybody gets counted.”

Hanaway is the same AG who announced an unrelated suit this week against the Missouri State High School Activities Association allegedly for “discriminating against white men when choosing board members,” despite 70 percent of MSHSAA board members already consisting of white men. She’s also an aggressive defender of the Trump-backed gerrymandering effort to give Republicans the U.S. House seat now held by Kansas City Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver.

“So there’s ample reason to be skeptical of the noble good-government stance Hanaway is striking in the new census lawsuit,” said Mathis. “… Hanaway is consistent, though. She is for Republicans getting more power and everybody else getting less. The census lawsuit is just more of the same.”

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