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posted by martyb on Friday July 24 2020, @09:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the counting-is-hard-when-it-counts dept.

With No Final Say, Trump Wants To Change Who Counts For Dividing Up Congress' Seats:

President Trump released a memorandum Tuesday that calls for an unprecedented change to the constitutionally mandated count of every person living in the country — the exclusion of unauthorized immigrants from the numbers used to divide up seats in Congress among the states.

The memo instructs Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the Commerce Department, to include in the legally required report of census results to the president "information permitting the President, to the extent practicable" to leave out the number of immigrants living in the U.S. without authorization from the apportionment count.

But the move by the president, who does not have final authority over the census, is more likely to spur legal challenges and political spectacle in the last months before this year's presidential election than a transformation of the once-a-decade head count, which has been disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.

[...] Since the first U.S. census in 1790, both U.S. 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."

It is Congress — not the president — that Article 1, Section 2 of the country's founding document empowers to carry out the "actual enumeration" of the country's population in "such manner as they shall by law direct."

In Title 2 of the U.S. Code, Congress detailed its instructions for the president to report to lawmakers the tally of the "whole number of persons" living in each state for the reapportionment of House seats. In Title 13, Congress established additional key dates for the "tabulation of total population."


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Friday July 24 2020, @12:50PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 24 2020, @12:50PM (#1025733) Journal
    I think this is an unhealthy way to look at totalitarian ideologies.

    Yet if people so chose to do so they could peruse the Fascist Manifesto. That was the booklet of ideas upon which Mussolini built up the original Fascist party from which the contemporary usage of the term originates.

    You can't base the ideology of a group like Fascists on public manifestos. They lie about everything, particularly promises, and those promises are pretty generic promises. The only real differences between Fascists and Communists of that time were that the Fascists would preserve in crippled, highly controlled form, existing systems like militaries, religions, and businesses, while the Communists would wholesale replace those with their own versions. Propaganda would then evolve to support those choices and these ideologies would attempt to take over other countries with the same themed tricks. My take is that's how Fascists became "right wing" and Communists became "left wing".

    Those differences don't matter much. Both quickly devolved to absolute state power. And once you get there, it really doesn't matter how it happened.

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