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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2020, @05:23PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2020, @05:23PM (#1025862)

    This is a huge part of the problem.

    STOP voting D just because they are D, or voting R just because they are R. Vote for people, not parties.

    Voting for a party (either D or R) just lets the party believe they have your vote "locked up" and so they no longer have to try to sway you.

    And if none of the candidates are suitable, then write in "None of the above".

    If all the people who don't vote went to vote, and all wrote in "None of the above", it would send a huge message to both the D and the R sides that they are both screwing up royally.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 26 2020, @01:08AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 26 2020, @01:08AM (#1026380)

    Pretty amusing how desperate the narrative is to repeat 2016 levels of apathy and anger.

    Oh the US is angry all right, but apathy has been burned out by all the COVID fever and fascist flamethrowers.