To answer the title question, House Republicans are certainly giving it a try, though the prospects for success appear to be thin at best. The House GOP voted last night to add a citizenship question to the 2030 census form. If successful, this would be done with the intent of not counting noncitizens in each state’s total population when those figures are used to determine and apportion seats in the House as well as the distribution of federal funding. It’s a worthy goal, but it faces a number of significant, uphill challenges. This is not the first time the GOP has attempted to do this. Donald Trump was pushing a nearly identical proposal when he was in the White House. But last night’s vote moved the idea closer to being a reality than it has gotten in the past. (Associated Press)
Some Republicans in Congress are pushing to require a citizenship question on the questionnaire for the once-a-decade census and exclude people who aren’t citizens from the count that helps determine political power in the United States.
The GOP-led House on Wednesday passed a bill that would eliminate noncitizens from the tally gathered during a census and used to decide how many House seats and Electoral College votes each state gets. The bill is unlikely to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate, the White House opposes it and there are legal questions because the Constitution says all people should be counted during the apportionment process.
But the proposal has set off alarms among redistricting experts, civil rights groups and Democratic lawmakers as a reprise of efforts by the Trump administration to place limits that would dramatically alter the dynamics of the census, which plays a foundational role in the distribution of political power and federal funding.
Democrats hate this idea and don’t seem to like talking about it. That’s because warping the census in their favor has been one of the driving reasons behind Biden’s open border policies from the beginning. You let ten million illegal aliens into the country and encourage them to all move to blue states. It’s a painful, destructive process as we’ve seen over the past few years, not to mention being illegal. But if it works, then the Democrats will take more seats in the House and a larger share of federal funding after the next census. That’s been the plan all along.
Both the Senate Democrats and the White House oppose this measure, so it’s probably not going to go very far. The Supreme Court previously rejected a bid to add a citizenship question to the census form, but they only did so because of procedural mistakes made in crafting the measure. Given another try, the justices would likely approve it if those errors were corrected.
Other objections to the proposal may carry more weight, however. Opponents are quick to point to Section 2 of the 14th Amendment. It’s true that the amendment states that representatives shall be apportioned based on “the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.” The authors originally only applied these rules to male citizens over the age of 21. However, these critics tend to ignore the rest of that section which describes situations where males are denied the right to vote based on the commission of various crimes. When such people are found to exist, Section 2 states that “the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.” (Emphasis added)
Honestly, most of Section 2 is a jumbled mess of words. However, the authors were clearly addressing the question of apportioning representatives and they repeatedly make reference to “citizens” when counting the population. That would suggest that illegal aliens would not be counted for such purposes. We have no official means of counting everyone aside from the census, so that would be the logical way to approach the matter. If the census isn’t tracking citizenship status, we’re leaving out part of the data that would seem to be required in order to comply with the Civil Rights Amendment.
While this was being debated, Jim Jordan asked another pertinent question. He said, “We ask all kinds of questions on the census anyway so what’s wrong with asking, ‘Are you a citizen?’” It’s a fair point. We ask about age, race, gender, and all manner of things. The better question might be, why wouldn’t you ask about citizenship status? The question of what we do with that information could be determined at a later time, but there shouldn’t be anything objectionable about recording the data.