MSNBC "All In with Chris Hayes" - Transcript: "Trump admits defeat"

Interview

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

HAYES: And joining me now Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, top Democrat in the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee which handles oversight of the census. I imagine you`re happy with the decision not to sort of try to get around the court order but do you have concerns about what the president announced today in the attempts the executive now going to make to get its hands on citizenship data?

SEN. GARY PETERS (D-MI): Well, we have a lot of questions. I`m not sure exactly what he intends to do. I think we need to get more information. But you`re right, I`m pleased that the citizenship question won`t be on the census. It`s absolutely critical that every person in this country is counted. It`s outlined in the Constitution. The Supreme Court verified and actually called what the Trump administration was doing a contrived plan to put something on the -- on the census form that would actually have political repercussions and not really be focused on what the intent of the census is which is to count every individual in the country. You`ve got substantial federal resources that come to states as a result of the count. You`re talking about the very core aspects of our democracy when it comes to representation and experts who deal with the census every day. Those that have testified before my committee were concerned about the undercount. In fact, the economists at the Census Bureau themselves thought you`d probably have several million folks, now counted probably nine million people or more, and to try to get them counted would cost hundreds of millions of additional taxpayer money to count them. It was a bad decision. And when you consider that the census is a very complex, difficult undertaking, and prior to putting any question on the census, they research those questions for several years. There was no research whatsoever. This just came out of the blue, was put into the census. Experts were clear it would lead to an undercount and now the president wants to look for other data. I`m not sure what he`s going to do but that raises a whole host of issues related to privacy, security of that data, and some of that data was given to agencies for one purpose and it may be transferred to another purpose, and that`s certainly something that the American people didn`t bargain for.

HAYES: Do you -- do you -- let me ask you a question I asked Thomas Saenz at the top of this. Do you view this as part of a larger political project to essentially reduce the political potency of constituencies particularly immigrant and immigrant adjacent constituencies that are not favorable to Trump or the Republican Party?

PETERS: Yes. I think there is -- it was clear. I think that`s what happened in the court case. There was evidence that this was based on politics. It wasn`t based on the reasons that they gave to the court. In fact the Supreme Court and the opinion said that the reasons the Trump administration gave were contrived. There was another motive behind it. You know, our Founders who wrote the Constitution were very clear that every person should be counted. This is a republic, a representative republic. And in order to have a representative republic work the way it should, you have to actually know how many people are residing in that country. It`s how we determine apportionment, electoral college, all of the core functions of our democratic republic.

HAYES: All right, Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, thank you for being with me tonight.

PETERS: Thank you.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source