Bridgette Dunlap, Missouri Independent

Red state AG's sociopathic nonsense is a threat to us all

Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway has filed a lawsuit seeking to require the Census Bureau to “redo” the $14 billion 2020 Census to exclude the persons she doesn’t consider persons. The U.S. Constitution requires that every 10 years “the whole number of persons in each state” be counted for the purpose of apportioning representatives.

Hanaway’s press release brags that her “first-in-the-nation suit” is “the most significant election lawsuit in a generation.” Indeed, her attempt to dilute the voting power of those in states with large minority populations (which tend to be blue, but also include Texas and Florida) is groundbreaking in its disregard of constitutional text and history. Since the first census in 1790, we have always counted non-citizens.

At both the founding of the nation and the adoption of the 14th Amendment, women like myself and Hanaway did not enjoy the rights of citizenship. But we were counted in the census anyway.

To this day, we do not let children vote, but we still count them. Because children are part of the population. The point of the census is to count the population.

Neither authorized nor unauthorized migrants can vote, but we need to know how many of them live here so we can allocate representation and resources.

There is one group of people who were not always counted as whole persons for purposes of apportioning representation. Hanaway’s attempt to evade that history is chilling. Her lawsuit correctly notes that the 14th Amendment states: “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed.”

Then her filing goes on to assert: “this same rule — expressed with materially identical text — also governed when the Constitution was first ratified.”

“Materially identical” leaves me at a loss for printable words.

When the Constitution was ratified, the text laid out that enslaved persons would only count as three fifths of a person for apportionment purposes. The 14th Amendment invalidated that horrifically racist provision. It got rid of the rule that only free persons and indentured servants be fully counted. This is the opposite of “identical.” But Hanaway and five other lawyers signed their names to this sociopathically revisionist nonsense.

Hanaway, presumably not wanting to beat up on the founders or the framers of the 14th Amendment, tries to re-write history to say we only started counting non-citizens in the census during the Carter administration.

Her claims are also incompatible with the constitution’s text. There is a word the framers used instead of “person” when they intended to limit something to citizens. That word is “citizen.” Courts have long recognized that the word “person,” for example as used in the Fifth Amendment’s guarantees of due process, grants rights to undocumented persons.

It’s good for the census to get a full count of who lives in the country, even if they are visa holders or undocumented. I also think it’s good to apportion representation and federal funding accordingly. You can disagree with me on this as a policy matter. But if you do, your beef is with the framers, so your only remedy is to amend the U.S. Constitution.

Constitutional text and history doesn’t get more explicit than this.

The requirements of the constitution aside, counting everyone in the census is also the right thing to do for moral and contractual reasons. Immigrants are persons who live in our states. Even those without legal status came at our invitation.

This country wanted undocumented workers’ low-paid labor. We gave them tax-ID numbers so they could pay taxes. We encouraged them to build lives and families here for decades. We built industries and got all our food on their backs. But we gave them no path to citizenship.

Hanaway filed her lawsuit at a moment when people are being grabbed off the street in Minnesota and across the country by masked ICE agents who have been detaining anybody who looks non-white. Hanaway’s suit was filed after multiple people trying to document or stop this have been shot by ICE agents, two of them fatally.

Hanaway’s lawsuit is ugly and unfounded. Even in these dark times for the rule of law and basic human decency, this gambit should fail and she should be judged for the attempt.

Bridgette Dunlap is a lawyer and writer living in St. Louis County. She has written for Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, ReWire, Ms. and Slate. Bridgette wants Missouri to be a great place for her kids, and all kids, to grow up.

I kid you not — this Republican just called the Constitution's foundation 'woke'

Missouri’s three most recent former attorneys general — all of whom claim to be “constitutional conservatives” — tripped over themselves to out-racism each other while auditioning for Trump.

This has not been good for Missouri. But it has worked out for the former AGs who have successfully used the office to get the hell out of Missouri and into federal office without having to pretend to do the work of being attorney general for too long (It’s a four-year term, but we’ve had four in six years).

When I wrote about the hateful and wasteful anti-diversity crusade of former-as-of-last-week Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, I wondered if I wasn’t whitewashing his efforts by avoiding using the more apt synonym for “anti-diversity,” which is “white supremacist.”

When U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley gave a speech last year in which he proudly proclaimed to be a “Christian Nationalist,” I thought the white supremacist dogwhistles couldn’t get any louder.

But Missouri’s junior senator and second most recent AG-for-a-minute, Eric Schmitt, yeeted the dogwhistles in a speech telling us exactly what he and the MAGA movement he has pledged allegiance to stand for: rewriting history to justify the dominance of white, purportedly Christian men.

Schmitt’s speech at the National Conservatism Conference followed one speaker who argued at length that America’s biggest problem is white guilt and another who insisted the U.S. is in a crisis that can only be resolved by becoming a Christian nation.

Schmitt went full blood and soil.

In the speech, titled “What Is an American,” he proclaimed that America is not “a proposition” or a shared set of values, rather it is a country for white people descended from European settlers, whose accomplishments should not be diminished by acknowledging the people that some of them enslaved, the Native Americans they killed, or anyone else denied equal rights at the founding.

Real Americans, in his view, can trace their ancestry to settlers. He frames his German ancestors as real Americans. He doesn’t call them “immigrants,” of course, instead contrasting them with other immigrants, Native Americans, and the enslaved people who long pre-dated his ancestors’ arrival. That requires either astounding ignorance or deliberate obfuscation of the fact that neither Germans nor Catholics were initially considered white or American.

Schmitt dismissed Americans’ outrage at the death of George Floyd and valorized Confederate generals.

Schmitt mocked the idea that “a poem on the Statute of Liberty” or “five words in the Declaration of Independence” define who is an American.

The five words he finds overemphasized and a tool of the woke: “all men are created equal.”

I kid you not. Read the speech.

Schmitt is peddling a perverse and revisionist originalism in which only the founders who won the debates of the time matter. He calls us back to when the Constitution was first signed — when it counted enslaved people as 3/5ths of a person to appease slaveowners.

He is rejecting the Constitution that the people of the U.S. amended with the 14th, 15th and 19th Amendments to include those of us who are not male or white.

Schmitt made repeated allusions to the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. This is the increasingly widespread conspiracy theory that Jews are bringing non-white people into this country to replace its rightful white owners. That’s what the “good people on both sides” as Trump put it, who chanted “Jews will not replace us!” in Charlottesville were referring to.

Schmitt hired a staffer who was fired by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign for making a video containing Neo-Nazi imagery and has too many ties to white supremacists for me to detail here.

Schmitt’s proposition that certain people are entitled to rule based on ancestry or power, rather than required to convince voters of varying backgrounds to vote for them, is not just a horrifying thing to say outloud. It’s an ideology that underlies so many real world illegal power grabs — from Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election to Governor Mike Kehoe and Republican legislators’ effort to redistrict away Kansas City area citizens’ voting power.

Nevertheless, I take solace in the fact that — though truly horrific words came out of the mouth of our sitting senator — the video shows his speech was sparsely attended and everyone looked bored.

There are more of us than there are of them. Schmitt can try to rewrite our history and claim this country isn’t “based on a proposition,” but Lincoln was right. This nation was “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”