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For more than a year, the Trump administration has attempted to carry out a brazen, undemocratic power grab. But it has nothing to do with the election.

Beneath the din of Trumps lies about voter fraud and refusal to concede, his administration has engaged in a subtler and likely far more consequential effort to manipulate the electoral playing field to the Republican Partys advantage. At its core is the pivotal (if mundane) once-a-decade task of using census data to reapportion seats in the US House of Representatives.

In a memorandum published on July 21, 2020 a year after the Supreme Court struck down Trumps effort to depress census participation by including a citizenship question on the questionnaire the president claimed he had the authority to exclude undocumented immigrants from the census population counts used to allocate House seats.

Trumps move, currently awaiting review before a Supreme Court whose ranks now include three of his appointees, would not only redistribute seats (and Electoral College votes) away from densely populated states, it would also likely result in the misallocation of federal resources during a historic pandemic and economic crisis.

If Trump and the GOP are successful in court refashioning the peoples house to disadvantage electoral majorities and buttress their own power it will receive far less attention than the spectacle of the elections. Stealthy power grabs targeted at taken-for-granted democratic institutions typically do. And that, among other things, is what makes them so dangerous.

In a country rife with counter-majoritarian political institutions, the House of Representatives, apportioned based on total state population, stands as a potential democratic counterweight. Yet that hasnt stopped political coalitions facing electoral irrelevance from rewriting the rules to entrench their power.

Following the 1920 census, which portended a dramatic shift in power toward urban population centers like Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit, a legislative coalition of rural Democrats and Republicans simply blocked the process for an entire decade, locking in rural control of an increasingly urban America.

Members of the rural coalition were motivated by a raw desire to maintain power: historian Charles Eagless analysis of roll-call votes taken throughout the 1920s reveals that the greatest source of opposition came from members of congressional delegations likely to lose seats as a result of reapportionment.

Reapportionment foes also drew strength from a set of nativist arguments. As William Vaile, a GOP congressman from Colorado, complained, the post-1920 apportionment legislation would increase the weight of districts of largely foreign make-up such that [a]lien elements will control the election of their Congressmen.

Those who represented recently arrived immigrants saw the power play for what it was. Meyer Jacobstein, a member of New Yorks congressional delegation, argued that [w]henever reapportionment is faced with a shifting population, you get injustice because people who have authority never willingly relinquish it.

The 1920 reapportionment fiasco ended in an awkward, brokered compromise. As stipulated in a 1929 law called the Permanent Apportionment Act, House seats would be automatically reapportioned after every decennial census. In exchange, reapportionment opponents received a concession: congressional districts were no longer required to be compact, contiguous, and roughly equal in population mandates that had been in nearly every apportionment bill since 1842. Abandoning these criteria created a new opportunity for rural interests in the form of legislative malapportionment.

For the next thirty years, rurally dominated (and also malapportioned) state legislatures designed congressional districts to cabin the power of population centers. The population of Georgias Fifth Congressional District following the 1960 Census was 823,680; its Ninth Congressional District contained only 272,154 people. This persisted until 1964, when the Supreme Court essentially reinstated the redistricting criteria Congress had abandoned in 1929.

While the case put an end to intrastate malapportionment, malapportionment among states remains a problem in the House, largely because the number of representatives has not grown since 1910, when Congress fixed its size at 435 members. As Jeffrey Ladewig and Matthew Jasinski point out, this sets the House apart from lower chambers in peer countries (see below), whose seats tend to expand in proportion to their population.

After the 2000 Census, the interstate population discrepancy between two House districts ran as high as 410,012, twenty-one times greater than the intrastate malapportionment the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional in precedents such as White v. Weiser (1973).

And the problem runs deeper still.

By the late 1970s, only a decade after the legislative reapportionment revolution, nativist organizations began developing a renewed theory of apportionment. Organizations like the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and its legal arm, the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), argued that the one person, one vote standard articulated in the Supreme Courts Wesberry v. Sanders decision required excluding illegal aliens from population figures used in congressional and state-level redistricting.

Despite repeated dismissals of apportionment cases, FAIRs nativist arguments continued to percolate through the courts between the 1980s and 2000s. FAIR-style claims re-emerged most prominently in Evenwel v. Abbott (2016), where two Texans contended that including undocumented immigrants in state redistricting counts violated the 14th Amendments Equal Protection Clause because it diluted the power of their votes.

The nativist argument is at the heart of the Trump administrations efforts to exclude undocumented immigrants from congressional apportionment counts for the first time in American history.

The Supreme Court unanimously agreed that it was constitutional for Texas to use total population figures in redistricting, but left the constitutionality of nativist reapportionment schemes unresolved. Justice Clarence Thomas went even further, announcing in a concurring opinion that there is no constitutional basis for the one-person, one-vote principle.

The table of contents in IRLIs amicus brief in Trump v. New York spells it out in two blunt sentences:

A. Only Members Of Our National Political Community Should Be Represented In Our National Government.

B. Illegal Aliens Are Not Members Of Our National Political Community.

Supplementing the nativist logic is an emboldened theory of the imperial executive branch, which holds that the president may, via memo, evade statutory and constitutional requirements that apportionment be based on the tabulation of total population of each state.

While neither the administration nor its supporters can cite a single historical example to support their argument that the president can fix House apportionment on a whim, the ghost of Evenwel haunts the briefs. And at any rate, a court stacked with Trump appointees will likely be more open to alternative theories of reapportionment than the one that decided Evenwel.

The material effects of making undocumented immigrants vanish in the congressional count are hard to overstate. States with larger populations of undocumented immigrants would lose as much as 6 percent of their apportionment populations, while more homogenous states like Montana, West Virginia, and Maine would be safe. Texas would lose a congressional seat. California and New Jersey might too, and Arizona, Florida, New York, and Illinois would also be in danger.

Those losses would be mirrored in the Electoral College, further biasing presidential contests. And a fall-off in representation would mean a corresponding decline in federal dollars. Typically, an extra congressional seat translates to as much as $100 per capita in additional federal funding. As George Washington University researcher Andrew Reamer notes, because apportionment numbers are used as official tabulations in statutory formulas, the effects on funding could be far more dramatic:

Equally disturbing is what it would mean to open the door to the idea that Congress (or state legislatures) can redistrict on the basis of a principle other than total population. If undocumented immigrants can be excluded, there would be little stopping right-wing legal theorists from articulating other redistricting criteria. The result would make current partisan gerrymanders in states like Wisconsin look quaint by comparison.

The future of the 2020 apportionment controversy is not clear. While the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on the case later this month, the Census Bureau has indicated that it may not be able to comply with the Trump memorandum by the apportionment deadline of December 31.

Even if Trump does send his numbers to Congress, the House of Representatives could still refuse to accept them, which would likely set off a chain reaction of litigation that could take some time to resolve.

But whatever the outcome, this episode reveals that Trumps refusal to concede the election, however audacious, is consistent with a far more potent, and more powerful, strand of counter-majoritarianism with deep historical roots in the Republican Party. It is a strategy whose success derives in part from being unspectacular, buried in briefs, barely perceptible even to seasoned political observers.

And it is the kind of ideology that cannot be fought with defensive legal argumentation alone. It requires a good offense: a vision for reconstructing American political institutions that gives the majority the most important number in a democracy a voice.

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Trump Is Attempting a Brazen, Anti-Democratic Power Grab. And It Has Nothing to Do With the Election - Jacobin magazine

As Bidens Jan. 20 inauguration inches closer, this lack of preparation within the conservative movement has some of its top members worried they are unwittingly damaging their joint legacy with the president and creating an opening for the next administration to swiftly pursue a radical agenda. Meanwhile, Trump shows no signs of relenting in his quest to baselessly claim he won the recent election.

Republicans cant afford to get stuck in the denial stage of grief, said Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, one of only a handful of GOP lawmakers who have congratulated Biden on his victory. Sasse even broke Trumps unspoken rule by saying he would crawl over broken glass before allowing the Senate to confirm some of the names being floated for Cabinet positions in Bidens administration.

Weve got some big fights ahead, and itd be prudent for Republicans to be focused on the governance challenges facing our center-right nation, Sasse said.

Several prominent conservatives, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the situation, said they should be readying a legal response to Bidens promise to sign a series of executive orders on his first day in office that would undo some of Trumps key policies on immigration, foreign policy and deregulation. And they are frustrated by the lack of pressure Biden has faced to fill his Cabinet with moderate voices who might balance out progressive influences elsewhere in his administration.

As Trump declines to travel to Georgia instead criticizing the states recount efforts in a series of tweets conservatives have also become increasingly concerned that the Democratic candidates competing in a pair of Senate runoff races there will glide to victory if Republicans fail to communicate, due to fears of upsetting Trump, what Biden and a Democratic Senate could accomplish.

The winning narrative in Georgia would be that Republicans need the Senate to counter Joe Biden and [Vice President-elect] Kamala Harris when theyre in office, said one prominent elected Republican. The problem is you cant make that case effectively when youve got the president telling some of his voters, Dont worry, Joe Biden is not going to be president.

Some conservative activists have found ways to toe the line amid threats of ostracization if they legitimize Biden as the next Oval Office occupant. In statements and internal communications, they nod to the presidents ability to challenge the outcome of the 2020 election, even as they encourage their own donors and activist networks to begin thinking about a Democratic administration.

Were preparing for all outcomes, because you have to, said Rachel Bovard, senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute. We support President Trump pursuing all his legal avenues because thats his right, but to be prudent we also need to talk about what a Biden presidency, even a Democratic-controlled Senate, means for the country.

We dont want to be caught flat-footed in a situation where we are confronted with a Biden administration, she added.

RJ Hauman, who serves as government relations director at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which supports stricter immigration policies, said groups like his have an obligation to conservative voters to keep them informed about Bidens policy agenda.

Hauman noted Biden has vowed to reinstate the program that allows so-called Dreamers, or undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children, to remain in the U.S. with legal protection. And Biden, he added, has also pledged to overturn Trumps travel and immigration restrictions on Muslim-majority countries, end Trump-era restrictions on asylum and place a 100-day freeze on deportations while developing new guidance on arrestable offenses.

Educating the public and preparing to fight things like the America Last immigration plan that is set to begin on Day 1 of a Biden administration doesnt undercut pending litigation or efforts to ensure that all votes are counted, Hauman said. If transition folks are quietly crafting ways to grant amnesty and open our borders, people need to know.

Its a weird moment in the pandemic: Theres promising news about vaccines and at-home testing and a nationwide surge in cases thats only expected to get worse in the coming weeks. POLITICOs Adam Cancryn and Dan Diamond break down the state of the Covid crisis and whats next with the holidays just around the corner. Plus, the nations largest public school system shuts down in-person learning. And Republicans denounce Trumps latest firing.

Part of the problem for conservatives who want to talk about Biden is that theyve been relegated to Twitter and other platforms that have become increasingly unpopular with the GOP base if they wish to do so. Far-right media outfits like Breitbart and Newsmax have been almost singularly focused on the president's legal campaign to overturn the election, while cable news giant Fox News, which affirmed Biden as president-elect, has seen a decline in its popularity in conservative circles.

All of conservative media is about the recounts [and] the fraud allegations, said a high-level employee at one conservative media outlet. Trump is basically the assignment editor for the conservative press.

Another conservative activist claimed they couldnt place an op-ed about Bidens social policies after an outlet they periodically write for declined to print the phrase a Biden administration.

You definitely have a grassroots conservative movement thats completely unwilling to discuss anything related to a Biden administration, said the conservative nonprofit employee. Ive gotten flack for appearing on Fox News programs.

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In addition to conservative organizations, the fear of challenging Trump on the election has engrossed the House and Senate GOP caucuses, too. As of this week, only nine Republican senators and 11 House members have recognized Biden as president-elect or publicly acknowledged the likelihood that he will be sworn in as president in two months.

Several Republican governors have also withheld congratulations to Biden while the Trump campaign pursues a growing number of legal challenges in Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania, and demands a recount in Wisconsin, where current vote totals show the president losing by about 20,000 votes. Election officials and legal experts say the efforts are highly unlikely to succeed or have any significant effect on the results.

Without being able to openly plot against Biden or poach administration officials, several conservatives have been preparing discreetly and with limited insight into when theyll be allowed to speak out against the new administration without jeopardizing their careers or losing donors and grassroots support.

Its easy to prepare internally, but its hard to publicly point to whats going to happen Day 1 because if we do, we look like traitors to the president, said one official at a Washington-based conservative think tank. In reality, were trying to preserve his legacy and stop radical policies that are quietly in the works.

Daniel Lippman contributed to this story.

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Traitors to the president: Conservatives fear public preparation for Biden term - POLITICO

Fabio Rojas, Opinion contributor Published 6:00 a.m. ET Nov. 6, 2020 | Updated 4:04 p.m. ET Nov. 7, 2020

Do protests ever enact real change? Yes. But not all movements are created equal. Here's the ingredients of a successful movement. USA TODAY

Activists should stay focused on what the government does, not who gets elected.

The era ofPresident Donald Trump appears to benearly over and people will soon move on.

Within the Republican Party, there will be a long discussion about whether the party will represent big-government nationalism or try to reclaim its roots as a party of business and limited government.

Similarly, Democrats will need to think about whether they will pursue the progressive vision of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez orthe more centrist tradition embodied by Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris.

Activists, on the left and right, should take the transition to a new president, and a new balance of government, as a time to reflect on the role that activism has in American society.

We live in an era of polarized activism. When you see a protest, you are likely looking at an assembly of mostly Democrats or Republicans. You rarely see a crowd of people who represent the breadth of American society.

Protesters raise signs outside the federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon, in the early morning of July 26, 2020.(Photo: Trevor Hughes, Trevor Hughes-USA TODAY NETWORK)

The extremely partisan makeup of protests is well documented. Tea Party protesters in the 2010s were mainly Republicans, and people who participated in the March for Science in the late 2010s were mainly Democrats.

As a researcher who specializes in activism, I studied the anti-Iraq War movement and found that almost all protesters were self-identified Democrats or members of very left third parties. It is challenging to find any form of civic participation or activism today that is not so heavily partisan.

This is a bad thing. Of course, some forms of politics will almost certainly be heavily partisan by their nature. But there are many issues that deserve to be pulled out of the rigid left-right axis that constrains so much of our politics. Sometimes, we need to realize that positive social change will need a broader coalition where people need to leave their voter registration card by the door.

How should activists improve? First, activists should adopt a new mantra: policies, not presidents. Stay focused on what the government does, not who gets elected or even what elected leaders say. For example, we saw an increase of activists attention paid to immigration during the Trump era because President Trump made it clear that he intends to reduce immigration.

However, increasesin deportation and detention occurred during the Obama and Bush administrations as well. We needed vigorous and strident pro-immigration activism during those presidencies as much as during Trumps. Its about the issue, not which team gets elected.

Second, activists should make bridge building a priority. It may not work for every issue, but activist leaders should take the initiative to identify issues where it makes sense to reach out to the other side.

Anti-war politics during the Bush and Obama years provides another example. Whatever the merits of starting the Iraq War, it was clear by the late 2000s that there needed to be a bipartisan conversation about bringing that conflict to a close.

Activists could have played a role in that conversation by maintaining constant pressure on the Obama administration to completely withdraw troops. Instead, the antiwar movement backed off, Obama allowed troops to stay in Iraq, escalated troop levels in Afghanistan, and intervened in Syria.

Today, we see the pernicious effects of partisanship appearing once again in the discussion of police misconduct. The Black Lives Matter movement has focused on an issue that should be of great concern to all Americans. Every year, approximately 1,000 U.S. residents die at the hands of the police, many are from Black and brown communities, and misconduct often goes unpunished.

One might expect a broad bipartisan conversation about how to improve policing. Sadly, most discussion has become highly partisan. Recent research on Black Lives Matter protests suggests that the movement is strongly aligned with the Democratic Party as most participants self-identify with that party.

Similarly, conservative activists have chosen to focus on the most sensational aspects of Black Lives Matter rather than engage in a dialogue about why it has been so hard to reform police. We need to be better.

If we can reorient the culture of activism to focus on policy over partisanship and bridge building, well get the activism that America needs. When a protest gathers outside the White House, the president will no longer be able to write it off as a motley crew of angry partisans.

Instead, the protest will send a clear message: America needs to talk about this. Not just some of us, but all of us.

Fabio Rojas is the Virginia L. Robertsprofessor of sociology at Indiana University-Bloomington and a senior fellow at the Institute for Humane Studies. He is the author of "From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline."

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Why activists for police, immigration reform need to focus on policies, not presidents - USA TODAY

"There will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration, No. 1," Biden told National Public Radio earlier this year. "I'm going to make sure that we have border protection, but it's going to be based on making sure that we use high-tech capacity to deal with it."

That could also mean withdrawing National Guard troops Trump sent to the border to support the Department of Homeland Security, a deployment extended through this year.

Beyond the wall, the president-elects broader immigration plans represent a complete reversal of the Trump administrations policies over the past several years and he can accomplish much of it fairly easily.

Biden wants to expand opportunities for legal immigration, including family and work-based visas as well as access to humanitarian visa programs. Bidens immediate moves would largely entail rescinding various actions initiated under Trump that barred immigrants from certain countries and curtailed legal immigration, including new restrictions on asylum and rules making it harder for poor immigrants to obtain legal status.

Biden also has vowed to prioritize the reunification of any families still separated under the Trump administrations now-defunct zero-tolerance policy which led to the separation and detention of more than 2,800 migrant families and children in 2018.

Biden has faced criticism for the number of deportations that took place under the Obama administration, which deported 3 million undocumented immigrants over eight years. (The Trump administration has deported fewer than 1 million over the last three fiscal years.)

During his administration, President Barack Obama focused on deporting recent border-crossers and expanded a federal program that required local law enforcement to share fingerprint information with immigration authorities.

While Biden would continue the Obama administrations enforcement focus on those who pose threats to public safety and national security, he also said the Obama administration waited too long to overhaul the immigration system, and he said he will make it one of his first priorities as president.

Biden also said he will take on the heavy lift of pushing comprehensive immigration reform through Congress a feat not accomplished since 1986 and create a pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. in his first 100 days. During the 2008 campaign, Obama also promised to push for an immigration reform bill in his first year, but it never came to pass.

Biden has pledged to end workplace enforcement raids as well. Rules implemented by the Trump administration, such as public charge, which allows federal immigration authorities to deny green cards to legal immigrants if theyve used certain public benefits, could also be undone, but that would require invoking the regulatory process, which would take longer.

In a twist, a federal court vacated the public charge rule Monday, teeing up a court battle that could land before the newly cemented conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Notably, Trumps newest Supreme Court appointee, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, was involved in the case when it was before the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and will have to recuse herself from weighing in on the case again.

But there are a range of legal routes the Biden administration could take over the issue regardless of whether the Supreme Court agrees to hear the case, including holding up the legal dispute by issuing a new rulemaking plan or settling the lawsuits challenging the rule in court.

In addition, Biden said he will restore the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which grants deportation relief and work permits to those brought illegally to the U.S. as children. The Trump administration tried to end the program, but that effort was blocked by the Supreme Court.

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Biden will stop the border wall and loosen immigration again - POLITICO

Millions of Americans will have decided the next president by Tuesday night, consequently supporting one candidates policies. And in an election as heavily contested as this years, a number of socio-political issues prevail on voters minds, including that of DACA.

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, also known as the DREAM Act the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act is a 2012 policy that allows undocumented children brought to the United States to stay in the country for renewable two-year periods.

Boston Universitys Latin American Studies department hosted an online panel Tuesday entitled What Is DACA? featuring a variety of speakers from academia, law and government.

Immigration attorney Brian Plotts started the discussion by introducing the legal structure of DACA, as well as requirements for becoming a DACA recipient. Since 2017, when the Trump administration attempted to rescind the legislation, Plotts said, DACA has significantly changed.

No new DACA applications are now being accepted. Only DACA renewal applications are being accepted, Plotts said during the event. During the course of DACA, too, the age limitation [of 15 years old] was taken out and three-year cards were granted, but thats been rescinded too.

This summer, President Donald Trumps administration continued litigation to overturn DACA, bringing the case to the Supreme Court, where the justices ruled to protect the program.

DACA had left a profound impact on migrant children, said Alberto Fierro Garza, Bostons consul general of Mexico. He said at the event the U.S. has accepted nearly 826,000 DACA recipients since 2012, most of whom were born in Mexico.

We have seen how DACA has changed the lives of many families, Fierro Garza said, hundreds of thousands of Mexican families that at least now have a person that can work legally, that can drive [legally].

Fierro Garza added that the 50 Mexican consulates in the U.S. were actively registering families for DACA documentation before the recent decrease in applications.

Damariz Itzel Posadas Aparicio, a graduate student in BUs School of Theology, said she herself is a DACA recipient, and growing up in the U.S., she was initially oblivious to her familys undocumented status.

Originally, my family did try to go through with asylum. We did turn ourselves in. Unfortunately, we were denied, Aparicio said. I didnt know that these borders even existed, to be honest.

It was not until Aparicio was older that she realized her immigrant status served as an obstacle for her to live a normal life.

Im not legal. I cant do this, I cant go to college, I cant drive, I cant find work for my mother to help her pay all these bills. I cant do anything, Aparicio said. To top it all off, because Ive been here since such a young age, I was so ingrained into the U.S. way of thinking.

Aparicio said she is grateful for the federal DACA program, which she said allowed her to attend college and subsequently pursue a masters degree at BU.

However, Aparicio said an unsolved limitation remains within DACA: the program provides working permits for the children, but not their parents. This has led to the presence of many mixed families immigrant families with parents who do not have legal status and children who are either DACA recipients or U.S. citizens.

DACA did not keep my family together, Aparicio said. As much as it is a blessing for me, it is a curse for the immigrant community, because it means that our families are still divided in this way, and it means that we still suffer because of this division thats constantly recurring.

Cristian De La Rosa, a clinical assistant professor in STH, spoke at the panel about a need for more focus on human rights for immigrants the term illegal, for example, harms migrants by dehumanizing their existence.

When it comes to the discussion of the current pandemic, De La Rosa said in an interview systemic racism especially affects the immigrant community.

A lot of immigrant people are dying now because of COVID-19 and the impact of racism on quality health access, De La Rosa said. It is really like denying the fact that we are human beings.

A September study by the Kaiser Family Foundation and The Undefeated found 70 percent of Blacks believed the health care industry harbored racial biases that made getting proper medical assistance difficult.

De La Rosa said she believes these numbers illuminate the racial biases that members of Black and Brown communities must face in American society.

My hope is that their humanity is respected, that their rights are respected, and that they are given access, De La Rosa said, and be included in this nation as a nation of immigrants.

De La Rosa said events targeting immigration are meaningful to the BU community because they foster a more inclusive and empathetic college environment.

Institutions like BU, for example, can benefit from the participation of DACA recipients in terms of just being more inclusive and providing a more holistic educational process, De La Rosa said.

Natanael Sara Garca Santos, a graduate student studying Spanish, said students sometimes ignore the importance of sharing stories and building deep connections with peers in their community.

Because we are so focused on our career and finishing our degree, we get lost in actually connecting with the people around us and knowing their stories, Santos said. The fact that we pay more attention to the people that are around, the friends, the stories that they have and how different those stories are from our own context, we can just create more empathy and more solidarity with them.

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BU professors host 'DACA' panel, call for immigration reform - Daily Free Press