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Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHATZ. The first point is actually the main point, which is that we had the toughest bipartisan bill on border security in generations on this floor, and when Donald Trump found out how tough it was and how effective it was going to be, he told Senate Republicans to kill it, and that is what they did. So spare me the crocodile tears about the situation at the border. We had the opportunity to fix that, and Donald Trump explicitly said: Don't pass this. Blame me. Blame me.

No. 2, my good friend Senator Hagerty, who feels very passionately about this--his quibble is with the Constitution. The Constitution provides that all persons in the United States are counted--all persons. It says nothing about their citizenship status. So if you have a problem with the way the census is conducted, you have to amend the Constitution of the United States--not the law, not the statutory laws of the United States, but the Constitution of the United States.

I have lost count of the number of times Republicans have tried and failed to add citizenship questions to the census. We have to see this for what it is--an attempt to reduce the count in immigrant communities.

If that sounds like sort of a rhetorical flourish, a little bit too much, let me remind you that it was only a few years ago that the Supreme Court ruled against adding this question. They ruled against it. Why? It is because the real reason they wanted to add it was from a conservative effort who thought it would ``be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic Whites.''

``[B]e advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic Whites.''

They wanted to ask people the citizenship question not in a longer census questionnaire, not as part of their annual data gathering, but the first question out of the gate to scare people from interacting with the Federal Government because--listen, someone knocks on your door from the Federal Government, and the first question is ``Are you a citizen?'' You will decline to participate if you have friends or families or cousins or neighbors who may have mixed-citizenship status.

And here is the other quote, that it ``would clearly be a disadvantage for Democrats.'' This was never about gathering data. This was never about enforcing the law. It has always been and continues to be a pretext to scare people, particularly immigrants, out of taking the census, out of being counted at all, to undercount people and rig the political system in favor of one political party. And don't take this progressive Democrat from Hawaii's word for it; take this Supreme Court's word for it.

I am not a lawyer, but I remember this--I remember they said they had no non pretextual reason to ask that question. In other words, they were asking this question in order to gain partisan advantage.

So for those reasons, I respectfully object.

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