Ranking Member Raskin’s Opening Statement at Subcommittee Hearing on Republicans’ Scheme to Weaponize the Census for Political Gain
Washington, D.C. (November 19, 2025)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, delivered opening remarks at the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government demonstrating Republican disregard for legal and historical precedent as they desperately attempt to weaponize the census for purely political ends.
Below are Ranking Member Raskin’s remarks at today’s hearing.
WATCH Ranking Member Raskin’s opening statement.
Ranking Member Jamie Raskin
Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government
Hearing on “Enumeration or Estimation: Why Inaccurate Census Results Hurt American Citizens”
November 19, 2025
Thank you, Mr. Roy, I appreciate it.
The call for a census in Article One of the Constitution plays an essential role in our democracy, guaranteeing for centuries that there will be an appropriate allocation of House seats and districts of equal population within each state.
President Trump’s extraordinary mid-decade partisan gerrymander offensive has hit major roadblocks recently in California, in Utah, and in federal court in Texas, but his forces have continued on their path of destruction and are now targeting the 2020 Census itself as a way to tear up the political map of the country.
This week, President Trump released this telltale statement on social media: “This all began with the Rigged Census. We must keep the Majority at all costs. Republicans must fight back!” So what a syllogism we’re offered: because Trump must keep the majority at all costs. Therefore, the 2020 Census was rigged.
This is lunacy. It’s like saying, because Trump had to win the 2020 election, he really wanted to win it, therefore, the election was rigged and he won it, and that’s just derangement.
The 2020 Census was not rigged. The 2024 report by the Government Accountability Office reviewing the accuracy of the census found that the accuracy of the 2020 national population count was consistent with the previous census. While the Bureau’s post-enumeration survey estimated statistically significant net coverage errors in certain regions and states, the accuracy of the count was overall consistent and overcounts and undercounts at the margins are nothing new.
The census was not rigged. The actual institutional weakness of the census, as the GAO reported, is the chronic undercount of communities of color which persisted during the 2020 Census. “[In] 2020 and 2010, Black or African American and Hispanic persons, young children, and renters were undercounted, while non-Hispanic White persons, adults over 50, and homeowners were systematically overcounted.”
Are we going to have a hearing planned on that? Maybe on the same day we’re going to have a hearing with the Epstein victims? I don’t know.
The Census Bureau faced unprecedented challenges in conducting the 2020 Census because of the raging global pandemic and the government’s inadequate response to it. Covid-19 significantly complicated census activities, many of which were suspended or delayed. In many states and localities, lockdowns and travel restrictions stopped the Census Bureau from accessing communities entirely. The Bureau also had to contend with natural disasters in a number of states, as well as a planning budget that had been dramatically cut by the first Trump Administration. These two are the real problems that we should be discussing today. Instead, we seem to be wasting our time on a long list of fanciful, self-pleading theories that have no basis in law or history, and that fly in the plain text of the Constitution.
Before we assign blame for any actual or imagined inaccuracies in the results of the 2020 Census, let it be clear that it was the first Trump Administration that was responsible for preparing the 2020 Census, and the greatest obstacle to an accurate 2020 Census count was President Trump himself.
He repeatedly sought to undermine the accuracy of the count by adding a citizenship question, which experts warned would dramatically depress participation, including by American citizens, and skew the results for Democratic and Republican states alike. Thank goodness that the Roberts court thwarted that effort when it found that Trump’s process was completely contrary to law and the President’s pretext for adding the blatantly political citizenship question was “contrived.” The Trump Administration told the court that they needed citizen question to help enforce the Voting Rights Act, and then after oral arguments, evidence came to light indicating that, at the request of the Administration, a GOP redistricting expert had provided an analysis showing that the addition of a citizenship question to the census and the use of citizen-only data for redistricting would politically benefit Republicans and the white community. The Supreme Court found the Administration’s formal excuses completely unbelievable, calling them “contrived.”
Now, in his second term, Trump and his allies are once again seeking to weaponize the census in an unlawful way and undermining its accuracy.
President Trump instructed the Commerce Department to exclude undocumented immigrants from the census count, a policy that one three-judge panel said “has already been rejected by the Constitution, the applicable statutes, and 230 years of history.”
The Constitution makes clear: the census must include the “whole number of persons in each State” to ensure a complete picture of who resides within the United States.
As Republican Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan stated during his introduction of the final text of the Fourteenth Amendment on the Senate floor, in 1866, after the Congress had already considered and rejected amending the Constitution to base apportionment on the voting population: “[The] basis of representation is numbers…; that is, the whole population . . . . Numbers, not voters; numbers, not property; this is the theory of the Constitution.”
In the face of this overwhelming textual and historical evidence telling us that every person must be counted, some state officials have filed meritless lawsuits against the Commerce Department challenging the constitutionality of the Census Bureau’s longstanding, constitutionally mandated practice to count all persons who reside within the us, regardless of their citizenship status.
Right-wing legal activists in Florida have also filed suit against the Commerce Department, claiming that the 2020 Census’s use of “Group Quarters Count Imputation” and “Differential Privacy” violated the Constitution and the Census Act and call the accuracy of the 2020 Census into question.
Don’t let the jargon or these tortured arguments fool you. The lawsuits are part of a coordinated strategy to give coverage to this mid-decade attack on the 2020 Census’ apportionment count ahead of the midterms. Our democracy and our society cannot afford our constitutional census being turned into a constant instrument of partisan conflict, division and advantage. Let’s reject this dangerous direction.
Mr. Chairman, I yield back to you.