GOP politican grills AAPI judicial nominee: Beware the "angry" Asian American

Dale Ho has been nominated for a federal judgeship in New York.

OPINION

A Republican U.S. senator thinks an Asian American nominee for a federal judgeship is too "angry" to be a fair judge.

During questioning of highly regarded civil rights attorney Dale Ho for his nomination to the bench, Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana told Ho:

“Mr. Ho, you’re a smart man. I can tell. But I think you’re an angry man,” Kennedy said during Ho’s Wednesday hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “We don’t need federal judges who are angry. We need federal judges who are fair and can see both points of view.”

Conservatives have targeted Ho, nominated by President Biden for a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, for his past tweets and his work as an ACLU attorney and as an advocate for voting rights. During the confirmation hearings last week by the Senate Judicial Committee, Ho had to undergo a gauntlet of questioning by Republican members of the committee.

Ho, 44, calmly answered Kennedy's attempts to catch the ACLU attorney in a contradiction.  Ho said he regretted the tone of some of his tweets that he sent as director of the ACLU Voting Rights Project during the Trump's reign. He argued two cases against the Trump administration at the Supreme Court, one of which successfully challenged Trump’s plan to include a citizenship question on the 2020 census.

The aggressive questioning continued but Ho parried the attacks by pointing out the inaccuracy of the senator's alleged quotes.

“You’ve described yourself as a, quote, wild-eyed sort of leftist,” said Kennedy. “Do I have that right?”

“Senator, I think I was referring to a caricature of the way that I think other people may have described me, not how I would describe myself,” Ho said. “I want to assure you that I understand that the role of a judge is to set aside whatever personal views ―.”

“Right,” interrupted Kennedy. “I heard your testimony. ... Did you say, quote, Republicanism is an anti-democratic virus?”

“No senator, I don’t believe I’ve used those words,” replied Ho.

“You’re under oath now,” said Kennedy.

“Yes, Senator, I don’t believe I’ve used those words,” Ho continued. “I do remember saying last year that there was a loss of confidence in our elections that has spread kind of like a virus.”

The back-and-forth  between the Louisiana senator using his southern drawl to appear folksy and the calmness exhibited by Ho until  Kennedy used up his question time.

The grilling by Republican senators on the Senate Justice Committee was countered by the Democrats on the panel who pointed out that past Republican nominees have had their own srong views and questionable "temperament." 

“When we talk about judicial temperament … with regard to now-Justice (Brett) Kavanaugh, there were over 1,000 law professors and deans of law schools who wrote to this committee saying that he did not have the judicial temperament to be on the Supreme Court, and yet, there he sits,” said Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii.

In response to the Republican attacks against Ho, a progressive group Demand Justice on Monday launched an ad campaign in support of Biden's nominee. The ad will run on television in Washington, D.C., and will be featured on online social media platforms.

"This ad campaign is an investment in making sure that Americans who care about protecting voting rights know President Biden and Leader Schumer have given Senate Democrats the opportunity to confirm a champion for democracy to the federal bench,” Demand Justice chief counsel Christopher Kang said in a statement.

Prior to the confirmation hearings, Ho's supporters, judges, lawyers, Democrats and Republicans,  issued statements on his behalf in an attempt to stave off the expected partisan attacks. “Mr. Ho is eminently qualified and would make tremendous contributions to the administration of justice in the federal courts, as well as to the communities served by our judicial system,” said  Priya Purandare, executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association.

Advice to future wannabe judges: Don't post mean tweets against members of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.

EDITOR'S NOTE: For additional commentary, news and views from an AAPI perspective, follow me on Twitter, @DioknoEd.

Trump wants the Census to not count undocumented

Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday barring the counting of undocumented immigrants in the 2020 Census that is currently underway.

A White House statement says, "Giving congressional representation and political influence to illegal aliens — people who have blatantly disregarded our laws — would be a perversion of our democratic principles."

It goes on to state that "allowing illegal aliens to be counted for the purpose of apportionment could also create perverse incentives — such as potentially rewarding states that encourage violations of Federal immigration law — that would undermine our system of government."

Dale Ho, an attorney with the ACLU told CBS that Trump has lost on the census before and predicted he will lose again.

“The Constitution requires that everyone in the U.S. be counted in the census. President Trump can’t pick and choose. He tried to add a citizenship question to the census and lost in the Supreme Court,” Ho said. “His latest attempt to weaponize the census for an attack on immigrant communities will be found unconstitutional. We’ll see him in court, and win, again.”

Asian Americans Advancing Justice called Trump's latest attack against immigrants "unbelievable and unconstitutional."

"This is the latest in a series of attempts to politicize the census and use it as a weapon in his anti-immigrant agenda. It is a move straight out of the white supremacists’ playbook that has every discriminatory practice to restrict the rights of Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian American people,” the statement continued.

Since the first US census in 1790, both US citizens and noncitizens — regardless of immigration status — have been included in the country's official population counts.

The fifth sentence of the Constitution specifies that "persons" residing in the states should be counted every 10 years to determine each state's share of seats in the House of Representatives. The 14th Amendment, which ended the counting of an enslaved person as "three fifths" of a free person, goes further to require the counting of the "whole number of persons in each state."

“There is no end to this President’s attempts to violate the U.S. Constitution. The constitutional mandate, as upheld by the US Supreme Court, is clear. The US Census must count all persons in this country," said John C. Yang, President and Executive Director of Advancing Justice. "We cannot allow the Trump administration to weaponize the census for political gain. Without the full census data, we all will be underrepresented and under-resourced for the next ten years.”

This is not the first time the Trump administration tried to influence the Census. Last year, under the White House wanted the Census delayed because it wanted to include a question regarding a person's immigration status. The Census Bureau's own study warned  that asking that question would result in people not filling out the questionnaire. States, fearing an undercount, sued the government and the Supreme Court ruled against the question.

“It’s just plain unconstitutional to exclude anyone from the Census. These renewed efforts by the administration to deter Census completion will be met with strong resistance. We know that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are already the least likely to complete their census questionnaires, and OCA will double down our efforts to get the word out for a fair and complete count of all community members across the country," said Rita Pin Ahrens, Executive Director of OCA – Asian Pacific American Advocates.

Census will not include citizenship question; Trump still trying to delay Census

UPDATE 11a.m., July 3: Donald Trump tweeted this morning saying that he is still trying to delay the Census in order to reargue the case for the citizenship question. The original post is below the tweet.

In a major setback to the GOP and Donald Trump, the printing of the Census form is proceeding without the controversial question asking about a person's citizenship.

Dale Ho, who argued the Supreme Court case as director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, said on Tuesday (July 2), “Everyone in America counts in the census, and today’s decision means we all will.”

The Commerce Department will go ahead with the printing of the dicennial tally despite Trump's request to delay the Census.

“This decision to move forward with the census without the problematic citizenship question is a victory for democracy!" said Rep. Judy Chu, chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. 

"Despite the false answer Secretary (Wilbur) Ross gave me about the origin of this question, we know from court records that the citizenship question was put forward by a Republican strategist looking to help the Republican party. In order to do so, they wanted to use the citizenship question as a way to frighten immigrants away from the census, hiding the true number of people in this country, and jeopardizing federal representation and funding for everything from housing to transportation to education.," continued Chu from California."

After the US Supreme Court turned down the administration appeal of a lower court decision to reject the question, Trump said last week he was looking at pushing a delay in the population count over the issue, which he's positioned as part of his broader crackdown on undocumented immigrants.

"I have asked the lawyers if they can delay the Census, no matter how long, until the United States Supreme Court is given additional information from which it can make a final and decisive decision on this very critical matter," he tweeted.

Asian Americans Advancing Justice and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund both sued to block the question based on the new evidence. Others joined in support.

The two groups along with other civil rights organizations argued that asking the citizenship question was an attempt to dissuade minorities and immigrants from taking part in the Census. 

The Census' own study estimated that the question would lead to an undercount of millions of people in the US.

Most recently, challengers of the question presented an unpublished 2015 study by a Republican redistricting expert as evidence that citizenship data would benefit Republicans when new political boundaries are drawn based on the 2020 census.

In the 2016 and the 2018 elections, most immigrants and people of color who were citizens  tended to register themselves as Democrats.

The US Census, mandated by the Constitution, forms the basis for representation in government and the allocation of federal funds for everything from infrastructure to social services.

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Census citizenship question case goes before Supreme Court

New immigrants might not respond to any question asking about citizenship, says a report from the US Census.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments Tuesday for and against the Trump administrations efforts to add a citizenship question to the U.S. Census which will be conducted in 2020.

With three lower court judges blocking the citizenship question from being added to the census, Tuesday's arguments will present the High Ccourt with one of it's biggest cases of the term.

"The administration’s clear intent was — to strip federal resources and political representation from those needing it most,” said Dale Ho, in charge of the ACLU's Voting Rights Project, after a New York court ruled against using the question earlier this year.

"Adding a citizenship question to the census would cause incalculable damage to our democracy. The evidence presented at trial exposed this was the Trump administration’s plan from the get-go. We look forward to defending our trial court victory in the Supreme Court,” said Ho, who will present arguements against the administration.

The controversial question would be included at the request of the DOJ, according to a memo by Wilbur Ross, secretary of the Commerce Department (which oversees the Census Bureau). It would supply block-level data on the citizen and noncitizen voting age population.

The Justice Department claims it needs the information provided by the question in order to enforce the Voting Rights Act. Critics have said that they suspect the real reason is to help suppress the vote of immigrants and people of color and is just an extension of Trump's anti-immigrant policies.

"Make no mistake – immigrants and citizens who have immigrants in their household will be reluctant to participate in a census that asks about citizenship," one of the dozens of immigrant advocates who have joined the case as plaintiffs, Advancing Justice l AAJC said in a statement.  

"The resulting undercount will be devastating to the Asian Pacific American community because as a whole, they are the 'newest' Americans, with 92% of the community comprised of individuals who are foreign-born or are the children of immigrants."

According to the Census' own analysis, the decision to add a citizenship question would stop “approximately 6.5 additional million people” from participating in the Census. In the New York case, the district court found that, as a result, California, Texas, Arizona, Florida, New York, and Illinois face a “certainly impending” or “substantial risk of losing a seat” in the House of Representatives and that numerous states would “lose funds from several federal programs.”

The ACLU prepared the following the video that explains what's at stake:

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ACLU's Dale Ho takes on voter suppression in Kansas

SCREEN CAPTURE / MSNBC

The right to vote should be a given in our country, but it’s not. Our country has a long history of suppressing the vote, but the efforts of Donald Trump’s allies have been truly extraordinary. They are a thinly veiled attempt to suppress the vote for youth, people of color, and low-income people. 

"We've got to stop them," says Dale Ho, the ACLU's Voting Rights Project Director. 

In this new video below, Ho explains this vicious agenda the day before the ACLU goes to trial challenging the voter suppression law in Kansas. Watch and share with your friends to spread the word. 

Take Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who headed Trump's sham commission on "Election Integrity." In 2013, Kansas enacted a law he proposed that requires Kansans to produce citizenship documents – like a birth certificate or U.S. passport – in order to register to vote. It had a devastating impact on voter registration in the state – particularly for people under age 30, who represented almost half of the voter registrations blocked by the law.

More than 35,000 people were blocked from registering to vote because of Kobach's unnecessary and burdensome law. That's about one in seven would-be voters. The case went to federal trial Tuesday, March 6.

A big part of the case will be whether Kobach can show that current federal law is not doing enough to combat voter fraud. The federal form to register to vote requires a person to swear under penalty of perjury that he or she is a citizen, a safeguard Kobach said Tuesday was too weak and “like nothing.”

"The law has made voter registration drives in Kansas all but impossible," says Ho. "Most people don't carry around copies of their birth certificates or passports, and they usually don't hand them out to strangers. Not everyone has a copy of their birth certificate, and securing one can take time and money." 

Kobach's law is based on false allegations of voter fraud by noncitizens – a trope Trump has been promoting ever since he lost the popular vote in 2016. Kobach bases his claims on an outright misinterpretation of a study. He's so wrong that the author of that study is testifying against him in the trial – on the side of the ACLU.

The good news is that Kobach must prove that there is "substantial" voter fraud in Kansas in order to justify his additional voting requirements to the National Voter Registration Act. Since 2000, Kobach’s office has identified only 129 noncitizens who registered to vote or attempted to register. In 2016 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit preliminarily found that the law caused "mass denial of a fundamental constitutional right."

The judge ordered a stay of Kobach's law allowing thousands of Kansans the opportunity to use their right to vote.

You might be wondering what's so difficult about showing a birth certificate.

Fortunately, I don't live in Kansas. I have my birth certificate but many people don't. In order to get an official, legally accepted copy of the original certificate, you have to go to the County Clerk's office of the county you were born in and pay whatever fee they require. I was born in Manila. If I didn't have my certificate, getting a copy would be difficult.

Fortunately, my parents were sophisticated and meticulous enough to have copies of the certificate which I now have in my possession. But many naturalized immigrants, especially those who had to leave their home countries hastily as refugees, might not have all the necessary documents.

Oh, by the way, you need that birth certificate and your naturalization papers to get a passport, the other acceptable proof of citizenship.

So, you can see the possible difficulties for people to provide proof. And if Kansas is going to ask proof of citizenship, will they ask everybody? Or, will they only ask people with an accent or people who are not white? The Kansas law is fraught full of Constitutional pitfalls.

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