As part of the Republican Party’s scramble to gerrymander new district maps, a great many GOP officials have complained that the 2020 Census wasn’t good enough. To that end, Republican Sen. Jim Banks of Indiana issued this press release on Monday afternoon:
[Banks] sent a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick urging the Department of Commerce and the U.S. Census Bureau to investigate and correct significant errors from the 2020 Census that may have improperly shifted congressional representation and Electoral College votes to Democrats and illegal aliens. Senator Banks warned that, among other problems, the Biden administration used a controversial statistical method called differential privacy … to interpret and publicize Census data.
In his correspondence to the Cabinet secretary, the GOP senator specifically noted that the 2020 Census — a project that Banks condemned as a “fraud” — was “prepared by the Biden administration.”
Around the same time, Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama appeared on Fox News and insisted that Democrats had “rigged” the 2020 Census.
There’s one rather important flaw in this partisan case: There was no Biden administration in 2020. At the time, Donald Trump was president.
This comes up far more often than it should.
A couple of months ago, for example, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis argued that “the Biden administration” shortchanged the Sunshine State in the last census. In July, Republican Rep. Mike Collins of Georgia blamed Joe Biden and his team for social unrest in the summer of 2020 — several months before the Democrat took office.
A year earlier, Trump claimed that the “the White House” rigged the 2020 election, neglecting to mention that he was the one living in the White House at the time. Around the same time, then-Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody (months before she became a U.S. senator) took aim at the Biden administration’s approach to criminal justice protests in 2020 — when there was no Biden administration.
The year before that, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia blamed the Biden administration’s policies for a Michigan woman whose sons died in 2020, when Biden was a private citizen and Trump was president.
Months later, Rep. Ronny Jackson of Texas blamed Biden for “paying people to stay home” in 2020, referring to a law that Trump signed into law. The same week, Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado blamed the Democrat for Covid-related school closures in 2020, a year that Biden spent campaigning. In an especially amusing example, in 2021 — just one year after 2020, when memories about the previous year should’ve been fresh — former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany pointed to crime data from 2020 to blame Biden for the U.S. murder rate, apparently unaware that it was her former boss who was president at the time. Georgetown University professor Renee DiResta joked this week, “‘Who was president in 2020?’ is the question of our time.” The number of Republicans who continue to struggle with the question is amazing. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
Latest Post
Recommended
