Some Republicans in Congress have called for requiring a citizenship question on the decennial census questionnaire and excluding non-citizens from the count used to determine political power in the United States. ing.
The Republican-led House of Representatives was scheduled to vote on Wednesday on the Equal Representation Act, which would exclude noncitizens from the tallies collected during the census and used to determine how many House seats and electoral votes each state receives. . The bill is unlikely to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate, the White House opposes it, and there are legal challenges because the Constitution requires everyone to be counted in the apportionment process. be.
But the proposal is seen by redistricting experts as a relapse in the Trump administration’s efforts to place restrictions that could dramatically change the dynamics of the census, which plays a fundamental role in the distribution of political power. , causing alarm among civil rights groups and Democratic lawmakers. and federal funding.
Still, opponents say that while the idea was once on the ideological fringes, it has never progressed this far in the legislative process.
Senators rejected similar Republican-backed language in a spending bill in March. The push is seen as an effort to shore up Republican policies on immigration ahead of the November election, in which Donald Trump is the party’s presumptive nominee against Democratic President Joe Biden.
“This is closer to reality than ever before,” said Steve Jost, who served as a Census Bureau official in the Obama and Clinton administrations. “This is part of the Republican unity strategy, which is to get every advantage possible in a country so tightly divided.”
The Fourteenth Amendment requires seats in the House of Representatives to be apportioned to the states “according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of them.” Census numbers not only help allocate Congressional seats and electoral votes, they also influence the distribution of $2.8 trillion in federal funds.
A similar effort failed before the last census in 2020, when the Supreme Court blocked the Trump administration from adding a citizenship question to census forms. Following this defeat, the Trump administration sought to capture the citizenship status of all U.S. residents through administrative records and excluded illegal aliens from the count used to allocate congressional seats.
In January 2021, in one of his first acts as president, Biden signed two orders reversing President Trump’s directives.
At a House Rules Committee hearing on Monday, Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Utah) said that including noncitizens in a country’s population “takes representation away from the American people” and that Biden’s “border He said it was linked to a crisis. People who are not citizens.
“Local areas that are sympathetic to the president’s policies stand ready to benefit directly,” Burgess said.
Critics say the civil rights issue was inspired by the late Republican redistricting expert Tom Hofeller. He wrote that using voting age population instead of total population for purposes of redrawing Congressional and Legislative Districts could be advantageous for Republicans and non-Hispanic whites. .
Republican supporters of the bill argue that they are counting people who are in the U.S. illegally to help Democrats.
Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., said during the hearing that knowing how many noncitizens there are in the United States is “the best way to get accurate information.”
Redistricting expert Jeffrey Weiss said that if Trump becomes president, the administration could take steps to add citizenship issues without committing the procedural errors the Supreme Court pointed out in its 2019 decision. He said there is a possibility that he will take action.
“This is really a replay of the fight that Trump started,” Weiss said. “If he wins in November, they will have more time to avoid mistakes and go through a more careful census planning process.”
The Biden administration argues that the Republican bill would increase the cost of conducting the census, make accurate information more difficult to obtain, and violate the 14th Amendment.
Census Bureau simulation results from last year showed that a significant number of noncitizens were missing from the 2020 census. Some civil rights groups argued this was evidence that the Trump administration’s push for civil rights issues was contributing to the underrepresentation of some racial and ethnic minorities.
“If you want to change the Constitution, you have to amend the Constitution,” said Rep. Jaime Raskin, D-Maryland. “You can’t just squint to see what you want to see.”
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