Kellyanne Conway’s flushable claims about the census citizenship question

“Why can’t we just ask the question the way it was asked for 50 years before the Obama administration yanked it out of there? We’ve been asking questions like this — the American Community Survey every fifth year asks a similar question. And think of all the questions that nobody complains are included in our U.S. Census every 10 years that include a far, far, far smaller number of Americans or, I would argue, are much more intrusive, invasive and expansive. We’re asking people how many toilets in your house, and you don’t want to know who’s using them? It’s absolutely ridiculous, and this is why the president is fighting for its inclusion.”

— White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, in an interview on “Fox and Friends,” July 9, 2019

Conway, a seasoned pollster, got a lot wrong in this defense of President Trump’s plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census.

The Supreme Court last month blocked administration officials from adding the question to the census form. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the court that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross — who oversees the Census Bureau and approved the citizenship question — violated a federal law that required him to disclose the real reason for the change. (For more on that, read our previous fact checks here and here.)

At first, the Trump administration responded to the court decision by dropping its plans. Then the Commerce and Justice departments reversed course and began exploring whether they could insert the citizenship question while complying with Roberts’s ruling.

View the complete July 10 article by Salvador Rizzo on The Washington Post website here.