SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2020, @01:42PM
You're missing a signficant historical component. All persons residing in the US at it's founding were considered to be citizens unless they declared otherwise, including slaves, hence the apportionment compromise.
However, several laws that were found to be Constitutional and have established precedent have determined that not all persons residing the US have access to all rights. Also the Supreme Court has ruled on multiple occasion that the President may control who is counted, unless it specifically goes against the letter of the Constitution (US citizens). Even in rejecting the addition of the citizenship question to the 2020 Census the SCOTUS unanimous opinion basically says that you probably have the ability to do what you want to do, but your legal premise was crap. We can't establish precedent on that. Please go back and use these references to construct a proper case.
Essentially, what you're proposing is that it is both legally and morally right that urban centers should import a ton of human capital, depress wages, lower quality of life, and increase taxation on the remaining polity while increasing their ability to vote themselves benefits (which, by the way would not have been permissible under original Constitutional law) from the overwhelming mass of voters who oppose such a premise.
Your argument is specious, fallacious, mean spirited and tyrannical hidden under a veneer of sophistry. Please, go do some underling task for your oligarchs and leave the rest of us alone.