Donald Trump’s mighty brain unleashed another completely illegal idea yesterday in an announcement on his fake Twitter site: Let’s have a completely new Census that doesn’t count undocumented people, and that way Republicans will probably have another electoral advantage in Congress. Dear Leader hereby proclaimed,
“I have instructed our Department of Commerce to immediately begin work on a new and highly accurate CENSUS based on modern day facts and figures and, importantly, using the results and information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024.”
If you’re wondering what the hell the results of the 2024 election have to do with counting the population of the USA, you’re not alone. Nobody has any idea, although NPR gamely suggested Trump may have had some as-yet inscrutable logic for it, writing, “It’s unclear why the election results would matter to the census. The press office for the White House did not respond to NPR’s requests for comment.”
Trump’s little screed added that “People who are in our Country illegally WILL NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS. Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
News outlets that were actually paying attention to the matter pointed out that the Constitution makes clear Trump has no power to do any of that, none at all. The Census is to be held every 10 years, Congress determines how it should be done, and the 14th Amendment specifies the Census must count the “whole number of persons in each state.” That replaced the original language in Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution, which specified “adding the whole Number of free persons” and then threw in that shameful three-fifths stuff for counting enslaved people. Notice that neither version limited the count to people with legal immigration status.
The Commerce Department, which initially seemed to be caught off guard by Mad King Donald’s latest whim, eventually issued a statement saying that the Census Bureau “will immediately adopt modern technology tools for use in the Census to better understand our robust Census data. We will accurately analyze the data to reflect the number of legal residents in the United States.” In other words, it will ignore the plain text of the Constitution, which requires an “actual enumeration” of the population, and that “whole number of the persons in each state” thing.
In addition to being blatantly illegal, Trump’s order is also wildly impractical, especially if he thinks he can order a new Census and reapportion seats in Congress before the 2026 midterms, or even the 2028 general election.
While the Census Act permits a mid-decade census for things like distributing federal funding, it can’t be used for apportionment or redistricting and must be done in a year ending in 5, said Terri Ann Lowenthal, a former congressional staffer who consults on census issues.
“He cannot unilaterally order a new census. The census is governed by law, not to mention the Constitution,” Lowenthal said. “Logistically, it’s a half-baked idea.”
Just preparing the decennial Census under normal circumstances is such a huge job that it takes the Census Bureau much of the 10 years between Censuses to get everything ready. That doesn’t mean Trump won’t try to monkey around with it, because half-assing everything is built into the Trump Operating System.
And as NPR’s Hansi Lo Wang, a Census nerd par excellence, points out, several Republicans in Congress are already pushing for unconstitutional tweaks to the Census, because the whole party is a bunch of criminals (that last is us, not Mr. Wang).
Trump’s demand for a new census appears to align with a House bill that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, introduced last month. That bill calls for not only excluding noncitizens from the apportionment numbers, but also a new census and round of congressional redistricting before the 2026 midterm election.
Asked about the bill, Trump said in July, “It’s going to get in. It’s going to pass, and we’re going to be very happy.”
This year, other Republicans in Congress have reintroduced bills that call for excluding either people without legal status or all people without U.S. citizenship, including green card holders, from the regularly scheduled 2030 apportionment counts.
Illegally excluding undocumented people from the numbers used to determine congressional representation could hurt not only blue states like California, but also red states like Texas and Florida, and possibly red states across the country whose agricultural industries depend on undocumented workers. A Pew Research Center estimate found that if the 2020 Census had violated the Constitution and excluded undocumented people, Texas, Florida, and California would each have lost one seat, while three states that lost seats due to overall population change — Alabama, Minnesota, and Ohio — would have kept those seats. In addition, excluding undocumented people would also change how states would draw district lines, likely giving Republicans an advantage. But again, doing any of that without amending the Constitution would be completely illegal.
And of course, since the Census also determines where federal funds are allocated — or did, before Trump decided Congress no longer sets the budget — illegally excluding noncitizens would also leave states in the lurch because those folks would still be in need of schools and other services, at least until they (and Democrats) are deported or otherwise face a final solution of their status.
Trump’s call for illegal tinkering with the Census is nothing new, of course; ahead of the 2020 Census, his administration tried to add a question about citizenship to the count, under the completely fictitious pretext that it needed the information to enforce civil rights laws. The Supreme Court threw it out on procedural grounds (because the administration half-assed the process) without actually ruling on whether it was constitutional.
Also, just in case you’d forgotten, even after the Supreme Court told Trump he couldn’t fuck around with the 2020 Census, Trump kept trying to embugger the 2020 count by excluding undocumented people, in hopes of reapportioning congressional seats to give Republicans an advantage. Those attempts to mess around with the Census went well beyond Trump’s earlier efforts to first extend, and then to cut short, the Census because of the pandemic, according to emails that only became public in 2022.
Joe Biden issued an executive order creating a “Scientific Integrity Task Force” to make sure that all agencies’ work was free from political interference; it even cited Trump’s Census fuckery in a report, as an example of how politics endangered the accuracy of the results.
Big surprise: Trump rolled back Biden’s scientific integrity rules twice, once on his first day, to make climate change disappear, and again in July, with a wholesale rollback of agencies’ scientific integrity standards, instead putting political appointees in charge of saying what counts as “science.”
And now, having made science a matter of political convenience, Trump wants to do the same for the Constitution. This will all be challenged in the courts, but it’s anyone’s guess whether the Supreme Court, which has been very accommodating of King Trump so far, will go along. Probably, because it so far has done very little to restrict the Divine Right of Trump.
Mean Judges Won’t Let Trump Ratf*ck Census, UNFAIR!
Trump On Census Will NEVER GIVE UP, NEVER SURRENDER, NEVER … Mind
[NBC News / NPR / AP / NPR again / Pew Research Center]
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