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Since the election, Democratic lawmakers have seemed a bit rudderless, but Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas has shown a willingness to engage her Republican colleagues' absurdity, and a fearlessness in doing so that should be an example.
That was on display in November when she tore apart the myth of anti-white discrimination during a hearing on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. And we got a taste of it last week, as well, when she gave House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer and South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace a lesson in institutional racism during a hearing on the U.S. Census.
The hearing Thursday concerned the bureau’s activities ahead of the 2030 census, which could affect everything from how many House members a state gets to how much federal spending each congressional district can tap. Comer had called the hearing to push the unsupported claim that the bureau has been conducting its count of American residents in ways designed to benefit Democrats and that Democrats have been aiding this effort by “facilitating” unfettered immigration. Mace helped fuel this baseless claim when she suggested there was something nefarious afoot in the census' counting of "illegal aliens," despite this being a longstanding policy (and for good reason).
Not only did the hearing push a bogus narrative about Democrats, but in doing so it obscured the fact that it's Republicans who may be benefitting from census machinations.
Ahead of the 2020 Census, Donald Trump’s administration and Republicans did everything in their power to meddle with that year’s census, and the result was a large undercount of Black and Latino people in the United States. That problem was compounded when, as I wrote in 2022, conservative lawmakers in some states, such as Texas, used the population growth driven by Black and Latino people to draw voting districts in ways that favored the white population — in a sense, turning Black and brown voters into white representation.
That very point was the subject of Crockett’s line of questioning, which she began by bemoaning that some of her colleagues — she means you, Rep. Mace — don't seem to understand what the census is even meant to do.
She cited census data showing that Texas’ population grew by 4 million people from 2010 to 2020 and quizzed Census Director Robert Santos about the underlying data, which earned the state two additional seats in Congress. “Of those 4 million people, do you wanna take a guess at how many were Anglos?” she asked. When Santos guessed “a majority,” Crockett gave him the exact number, “180,000 — that’s it, of 4 million people.”
She broke it down further:
So get this: We added 4 million people. They were people of color. Texas got two new seats. So they took those Black and brown and Asian bodies, and guess what? Do you think we got a new Black or brown or Asian seat? Somehow, the way that they do their Republican math in the state of Texas, that amounted to two new white seats. Guess what? White, Republican seats.
Crockett also mentioned the issue of “prison gerrymandering,” which is the inclusion of the populations of large prisons — which are often filled disproportionately with nonwhite people — in the resident count for rural, disproportionately white counties.
The Democratic base longs for fighters who won't shrink when facing off against MAGA extremism. In this case, Crockett exposed truth being camouflaged by right-wing talking points and provided a blueprint for her Democratic colleagues to do the same.
Watch the clip here: