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: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 25 2020, @12:09AM (3 children)
Only legal ciitzens are allowed to vote, but that doesn't mean that legal residents shouldn't have representation. Around here there are a ton of legal aliens who came here from various other countries and some stay for a few years before heading back, but I know people who have lived in the US for decades without getting citizenship. Should these people really be cutoff from representation just because they're not citizens?
Or, how about the people who lose their right to vote due to committing a felony, shouldn't they have somebody that's representing them?
The reality, is that this has far more to do with the fact that these people disproportionately live in places which vote Democratic and the GOP wants to end it as an effort to give themselves more power. They can't win elections without engaging in elections fraud, so this is the kind of thing they get.
A happy side effect for them, is that this would require redistricting, and provide another chance to draw the lines so that Democrats never have control of congress again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 25 2020, @12:46PM (2 children)
The problem with arguing about these issues on the internet is that they are /state/ issues. Most states either abridge the right to vote only while incarcerated or not at all, only a handful of states take voting rights from felons permanently. Allowing resident aliens to vote in elections is a local issue for local elections, national elections might be a different story.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 25 2020, @04:22PM (1 child)
So a state could theoretically allow non-citizens to vote? The federal government just prescribes who cannot be excluded.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 26 2020, @08:39PM
Yes. The Constitution sets floors and ceilings. States are free to do whatever they want between those ranges.