Originally published at: READ: A New Draft Rule for the Census Seeks Sweeping Changes to How Political Power Is Allocated - TPM – Talking Points Memo
The Trump administration is planning to dramatically reshape the data the Census Bureau collects, setting the stage for an audacious effort to curtail crucial information used in voting rights complaints and revive a right-wing effort, pursued in Trump’s first term, to exclude undocumented immigrants from the count used to determine how many members of Congress…
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I have a compromise. Each undocumented person counts as 3/5 the value of citizen. Founders would approve. Not sure what to do with green card holders. 4/5?
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I believe that’s the point and if TCF’s administration succeeds all hell will ensue. Money taken out of every department because there’s no data to back up a need. This is beyond diabolical. Who’s going to stop them?
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trump ceases to be president in January 2029 (or sooner). The census is mid-2030. The reapportionment is January 2031.
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I would like to see the data behind the notion that not counting non-citizens would predominately benefit Red states. Off hand two of the states with the largest number of non-citzens are Texas and Florida. Yes California and New York have a lot of non-citizens as well but what about all the agricultural workeers in the south and midwest. I just want to see the numbers. The belief that Red states will benefit might be wishful thinking on the part of Republicans.
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The most racist regime in our country’s history, with a Herman Goering wannabe pulling the stringd behind the wannabe king’s throne.
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Doesn’t the enumeration clause require a count of all persons?
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It’s not just the reapportionment of House seats, which I agree with you would probably hurt Texas, Florida, New York, and California about equally. It’s about the ensuing redistricting.
Immigrants disproportionately live in big blue cities. So counting everybody as we do now gives extra electoral power to those cities. If you exclude immigrants from the counting in the redrawing of districts, that drains electoral power from the big blue cities and reallocates it to the boonies where lots of Republicans and relatively fewer imigrants live. So red areas gain electoral power and blue areas lose it.
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If you think the right wing think tanks and their oligarch funders are going give up radically reshaping America after Trump, you haven’t been paying attention.
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Dude, I was litigating pretty much this very issue two decades ago.
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So was I. These changes will occur, if at all, in the early 2030s. The GOP impulse to eliminate non-citzens from the count used to determine representation goes back for more than two decades. It has never worked but we didn’t have a Federalist named Supreme Court until recently.
We haven’t visited the number of representatives to be apportioned since 1913 and the number of house seats to each state was set in 1941 with subsequent adjustments for Alaska and Hawaii. We really need to increase the number of representatives.
Instead of just saying no to the Republican proposal we really ought to be figuring out what would be an alternative that would be favorable to democracy in general.
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““To see a proposal that race and ethnicity data not be collected at all when, in fact, some demographic data has been collected since the first census in 1790 is a bit shocking,””
Yes, but for someone like Roberts, who likes to pretend racism is “over” and utters pithy batshit like “the way to stop discrimination is to stop discriminating”, the idea that you just cut it all off at the source is going to be exquisitely tempting. “JUST STOP TESTING AND WE’LL STOP HAVING COVID CASES.” Same fucking brain damage.
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PREDICTION, you heard it here first: James Carville thinks Trump will quit after the midterms. This is based on Carville’s assessment that Trump will always walk away from a situation where he thinks he’s losing. My prediction: He will resign just shy of 2 years in office and claim that permits him to run again in 2028. This will be to avoid the endless investigations a Dem congress will launch and will also be a bid to keep his dominant position in the Rep party. In normal times this would seem absurd, but well, these ain’t normal times…
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Won’t work. It’s precluded by the first clause of the 22nd Amendment:
(emphasis added)
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In short, unless a Democrat is elected in 2028, for the first time in history a census will be phony.
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You may be unaware of this, but trump was president for the 2020 census. He tried to do similar crap back then. It failed.
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Yeah, danger now is they get it into their heads that they can have Vance serve for more than 8 years as a willing puppet.
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I think this has a better chance of succeeding, but we’ll see. It’s another real test of their strategy of “we’ve got the players in place and all we have to do is feed them the sophistry they need as cover”. To be honest, I think the 6 will be sorely tempted and that if there’s anything that holds them back it’s knowing they’d be flirting with triggering total balkanization. It will be unforgiveable and may finally function as a last straw. But who knows…America has bent over to take it rawdog for the gerrymandering rulings and VRA crap so maybe we are just that willing to accept subjugation.
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