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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2020, @08:54PM
> President seems to be of the opinion that only legal residents of the country should be considered in the political process, and that this is something we should all be up in arms about. I'm sorry, but isn't that how it works in every country? Isn't that the only sane way for the system to work??
No, and specifically the US has a super complicated history with who counts. First, the job of a US House representative is absolutely not to represent the voters -- it is to represent the district. And that's an important distinction. When you represent a district, you represent the interests of all the people in that district. When the system was established, only a small fraction of the people in a district could actually vote. Landowning men were the only ones casting votes, but it would have been considered an obvious dereliction of duty for a representative to vote to pass a law that made it perfectly legal to murder women and children, for example. In the early days of the republic, there was also a lot of complexity from our colonial roots about how to count native Americans who were residents of an area but maybe not citizens of the US and had no legal status, but certainly not illegal immigrants because they had been there longer, etc. Likewise, it's contrary to the office to try and pass laws that unfairly disadvantage foreign workers with legal greencards, despite the fact that they can't vote, etc.
A representative represents *everybody* who lives in the district. Period. That's the job. And the districts are allocated based on how many people live in a place. Period. Your lack of iumagination about how things could work doesn't effect the text of the Constitution, or the long standing legal precedents governing the interpretation of it.
> Second, the author seems to believe that using the word "unauthorized" is appropriate when it comes to people who refuse to follow lawful procedures, in this case for entering a country. Surely, the correct word would be"criminal", or perhaps "illegal?"
We also have a complicated history in the US with racists trying to paint groups of people as inherently illegal persons with no rights because they made a misdemeanor border crossing that isn't a serious crime. Basically everybody in America has committed some sort of misdemeanor at some point, and it wouldn't be useful to paint all people as "Illegals." Since the racists have made a concerted effort to dehumanize and other groups by referring to them as Illgals, many news organizations prefer not to use that framing since it would not be neutral phrasing within the social context of the United States, even if it appears neutral and accurate in a vacuum.
> And violent rioters into "protesters?" Oh, wait...
If you are referring to the recent protests, thousands of protesters show up to protest, articulate clear demands, and then get shot at by police. in general, none of the protests have actually been riots, they have only become violent by being attacked by police. And in places like Portland, protesters are sufficiently organised they they are adopting things like shield wall formations to defend themselves from police attacks. The definition of a riot requires it to be violent and disordered, neither of which actually applies to the protesters.
> The crux of the matter is whether the term "persons residing in" should be interpreted to include "persons obtaining illegal access to." I would think the answer to that would be pretty obvious, but then I'm not an American.
If they are "persons" and they are "residing in" then there is nothing in the text of the Constitution that asks how they got there when it comes to apportionment of districts.