Kris Kobach attacks the Census and Costco | Opinion
I’ve been wondering what Kris Kobach is going to do with himself now that Donald Trump’s president again and he can’t sue the Biden administration anymore.
With all that’s been going on, you may have missed the news that Kansas’ attorney general has filed a suit in federal court seeking to overturn a century and a half of precedent that the U.S. Census Bureau counts everybody in the country equally (with rare exceptions for foreign diplomats and such).
Kobach slipped the lawsuit under the courthouse door three days before the inauguration, because if he’d waited a week, he’d have had to sue the Trump administration, and the lawsuit would have ended up being his political suicide note.
Kobach wants to force the Census Bureau to include a citizenship question on its every-10-years population survey, with an eye toward eliminating undocumented immigrants from the calculations that determine which states get more congressfolk, electoral votes and federal aid.
The idea is ludicrous on its face. If you were to ask illegal immigrants on the Census form, “Are you an illegal immigrant?” the number who would check “yes” would be so small as to be statistically insignificant.
But beyond that obvious operational difficulty is that Kobach is trying to rewrite American history to fit this narrative: “Because the federal government has been counting illegal aliens in the census, California has many more congressional seats and electoral votes than it should. This lawsuit will restore the Founding Fathers’ original vision of the United States.”
The founding fathers’ “original vision” with regard to the Census was the only people who weren’t to be counted were “Indians not taxed,” who were roaming around the wilderness and couldn’t have been counted even if the founders wanted them to be.
The first Censuses divided Americans into five categories: free white males age 16 and older; free white males under 16; free white females, all other free persons (i.e. free African Americans and Native Americans who lived in towns with the white people), and slaves.
The slave category was all Black, because white people who were bound to indentured servitude (which we’d consider slavery) were counted as “free” for Census purposes.
That’s not a knock on the founding fathers, who were, for their time, among the most enlightened people around. And they realized that you had to count everybody, including slaves, although they were considered property with no political or human rights.
To win southern support for the Constitution, the founders settled on the “three-fifths compromise,” which counted each slave as three-fifths of a person. After the Civil War settled slavery’s hash, the Constitution was amended by the 14th Amendment to explicitly repeal fractional apportionment.
One would think that Kobach would be aware of that historical context, being a former professor of constitutional law. Truth be told he probably is (it’s high school-level civics), but just chooses to ignore it.
Kris Kobach doesn’t think undocumented workers should count as even three-fifths of a human being. He considers them less than slaves.
Follow the money
There’s a financial aspect to Kobach’s lawsuit, in a section where he objects to federal funding being allocated to the states by population, including the undocumented persons counted by the Census.
In essence, Kobach’s arguing that tax money paid by undocumented workers (who do pay taxes) should be redistributed to states that don’t have as many of them.
It’s a weird flex, because Kansas can hardly argue it’s being unfairly deprived of federal funds.
For every dollar Kansas sends to the federal government, we get $1.30 back, according to the Rockefeller Institute of Government at the State University of New York.
That seems like a pretty sweet deal for us, especially compared to California, Kobach’s whipping boy No. 1, where taxpayers get back only 88 cents of each federal tax dollar they pay.
Maybe Kobach ought to shut up about that before somebody notices.
Kobach and Costco
Remember at the top of this column where I wondered how Kobach was going to spend his time now that he doesn’t have Joe Biden to kick around anymore?
The answer was not long in coming.
I was about halfway through writing about Kobach’s Census follies when I got a new statement from his office, that he’s now turning his attention to harassing Costco for being too “woke” for him.
Kobach and 18 other states’ attorneys general sent Costco a letter demanding the company comply with a new Trump edict and immediately end Costco’s diversity, equity and inclusion program, which gives a boost to people of color, women, veterans and LGBTQ persons.
“Costco should treat every person equally and based on their merit,” the letter says. “Now, the federal government is also focusing on ensuring invidious race based discrimination no longer finds a home in woke corporations. President Trump’s executive order recognized that “[i]llegal DEI and DEIA policies not only violate the text and spirit of our longstanding Federal civil-rights laws, they also undermine our national unity.’”
It goes on like that at some length, but the entire message drips with condescension and privilege, in its presumption that people hired and trained through diversity programs possess less merit as employees than their co-workers who are straight, white and male.
Granted, DEI programs are generally less than perfect and some companies take them too far. Years ago, I was told in a job interview at a large newspaper that they liked my work, but I was “too white, too male and too hetero” to be hired.
That hurt and it made me angry — still does, to some degree. I never applied there again.
But I’ve learned through my long career, including years as a hiring manager myself, that the lived experience of people who had to fight more discrimination than I ever experienced made them better journalists than many hires with prestigious college degrees and internships — even if I did have to give them some extra help at the start.
Political pressure
The AGs’ letter also states: “Companies renouncing DEI include Amazon, Ford, John Deere, McDonald’s, Meta, and Walmart. As the Wall Street Journal explained, ‘[c]ompanies are wise to re-examine their policies even without the political pressure,’ which is ‘steering companies back to their fundamental mission to focus on increasing shareholder value, rather than politics.’”
In other words, all those guys caved to our pressure, so why don’t you? Costco’s shareholders just voted 98% to keep the company’s diversity program.
Meanwhile, “increasing shareholder value” is the coded language for everything that’s wrong with American business today, from price hikes to mass layoffs and cutting wages and benefits, to offshoring production and despoiling the environment.
As for national unity, you can’t dictate that, you have to earn it. Telling more than half the country they aren’t worthy of their jobs is a poor way to start.
Unity through diversity is America’s strength, not a weakness.
Personally, I’ve never even been in a Costco. I seldom need to buy in bulk and I never understood paying a fee to shop in someone’s store. Also, there’s only one Costco in Wichita and it’s at the extreme eastern edge of the city, while I live at the extreme western edge.
But if they keep this up, I might just buy a membership — $65 a year seems a small price to pay to stand with a company and its workers who are standing up to the new regime. And I could always shop on their website.
The AGs’ letter ends with this demand: “Within 30 days, please either notify us that Costco has repealed its DEI policies or explain why Costco has failed to do so.”
If I were replying for Costco, I’d write back: “Our employees are all hired on merit. Wish we could say the same about Kris Kobach.”
This story was originally published January 29, 2025 at 5:16 AM.
