Trump wants to hold a ‘new’ census, excluding non-citizens: Can he do that?
President Donald Trump made waves earlier this month when he proposed a "new" census that would exclude millions of people living in the country illegally.
It's unclear whether the Republican president, with his penchant for disruption, wants that to happen during the next nationwide headcount in 2030 , for which plans are already well underway, or if it will take the form of a mid-decade census, which could be the basis for redrawing the country's congressional topography.
If it's the latter, it would be pricey, unprecedented and most likely unconstitutional, a panel of census experts said Tuesday.
"The bottom line, in my humble opinion, is that there will not be a Census before 2030," Terri Ann Lowenthal, a former Capitol Hill staffer who consults on census issues, said.
Lowenthal was one of several experts who offered their analysis during a briefing call put on by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights , which bills itself as the nation's oldest, largest and most diverse civil and human rights coalition.
If all this wonky talk about headcounts and political maps sounds familiar, that's probably because of the bitterly partisan fight in Texas this summer over a Republican-led redistricting bill intended to give the GOP more congressional seats in the Lone Star State.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has upped the ante, leading a push to redraw the Golden State's congressional maps to favor Democrats. Trump has since said he'll sue to block the effort .
If Trump's call for a "new" census is, indeed, a call for a mid-decade headcount, the Republican White House faces an uphill fight on several fronts.
First, any changes to how and when the census is conducted would require alterations to the Census Act and approval from Congress, which has oversight responsibilities. There likely would be a fierce fight, according to The Associated Press .
The federal law governing the census permits a mid-decade head count for such matters as distributing federal funding. But it can't be used for apportionment or redistricting and must be done in a year ending in 5.
"So the window of opportunity for this decade under current law is closed," Lowenthal said Tuesday.
Then there's the matter of the Constitution.
The 14th Amendment to the nation's foundational document says that "the whole number of persons in each state" is to be counted for the numbers used for apportionment.
The Census Bureau has long interpreted that to mean anybody residing in the United States — regardless of their legal status.
Federal courts have repeatedly supported that interpretation. But the U.S. Supreme Court has blocked recent efforts to change that on procedural rather than legal grounds, the AP reported.
"The Census clause in the Constitution, as modified by the 14th Amendment, requires an enumeration of all persons. That's all that it says — 'persons," Thomas A. Saenz, the president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund , said.
"Therefore, any attempt to extract, leave out, or never count particular populations [is] unconstitutional," he continued. "That means that any mid-decade redistricting that attempts to leave out certain populations, whether that's the undocumented, from the apportionment count or other non-citizens from the count used for redistricting, those are unconstitutional purposes, rendering a mid-decade census that attempts to accomplish those things unconstitutional."
An unsuccessful push to include a citizenship question in the 2020 census nonetheless scared noncitizens out of participating in the count, resulting in a "historic" undercount of key segments of the U.S. population.
That undercount five years ago included "very young children, African Americans, Latinos, American Indians, certain Asian Pacific Islander communities, rural communities and low-income households," Arturo Vargas, the senior adviser for the National Association of Latino Elected Officials Educational Fund, said.
Such actions undermine the public trust, which is a key part of the decennial count, he added.
Rebuilding "the public's trust and the public's participation is the most significant challenge that we have in getting a complete and accurate census," he said. "Undermining that undermines the Census."
Finally, there's the matter of logistics. The census is the single largest mobilization of the U.S. government, except for going to war, Gomez said.
The effort involves a temporary workforce of hundreds of thousands of census-takers. It can take as long as a decade to plan.
"Given the significant challenges and shortcomings of the 2020 census, a growing network of stakeholder organizations, philanthropic groups and researchers has been closely following the preparations for the 2030 census," he continued. "Our goal is to help the [U.S.]Census Bureau conduct a successful decennial [census], which is now in less than four years."
A mid-decade census has never been conducted before.
In the 1970s, there was interest in developing data from the middle of the decade for more accurate and continuous information about American life, and a mid-decade census was considered.
However, the funding from Congress never came through, Margo Anderson, a professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who has written about the history of the census, told the AP.
Decades later, those wishes for continuous data would develop into the American Community Survey, the annual survey of American life based on responses from 3.5 million households, the AP reported.
"If there's going to be another census before 2030, Congress must amend the Census Act and then come up with billions more dollars and then figure out how the Census Bureau can compress 10-plus years of planning into a few months," Lowenthal, the former Hill staffer, said.
Read more analysis from John L. Micek
Read the original article on MassLive .
