Tag: Citizenship in the United States

The government plans to ask people taking part in the 2020 national census if they are US citizens – and the supreme court appears to be leaning in favor of approval. The census is conducted every 10 years to count the people living in the US. The states argue the plan is unconstitutional. The commerce department, which is in charge of the census, says it decided to add the question at the request of the justice department, which argued it was necessary to help enforce the Voting Rights Act. “Yesterday, the Supreme Court took up the Census Citizenship question, a really big deal. The citizenship question was on every census between 1890 and 1950, but has not been on the standard census form since then. Currently, the government gets citizenship data from the American Community Survey, which is done every year but only goes out to a small number of US households. Three lower courts, in New York, California and Maryland, have ruled against the plan. Two of the judges said that asking about citizenship would be unconstitutional, violating the provision that says the census must fully enumerate people living in the United States. A majority of the justices appeared to be leaning toward approving the question during arguments on Tuesday.