Back in July President Trump signed an executive order designed to prevent illegal aliens from being counted in the 2020 census for the purposes of re-drawing congressional districts.
The census is used to determine the allocation of seats in the House of Representatives, the number of electors each state gets in the Electoral College, and how hundreds of billions in federal spending is divided among the states.
That plan is now being foiled by, of all things, the Census being set to miss a deadline.
According to Fox News:
For the first time in four decades the Census Bureau will miss their deadline on reporting apportionment figures used to divvy up congressional seats. The missed deadline will likely subvert President Trump’s plans to remove people living in the country without legal permission from the process.
“This important process, which has been a part of every decennial census, is critical to produce data that can be used for apportioning seats in the House of Representatives among the states,” the Census Bureau said in a statement Wednesday. “The schedule for reporting this data is not static. Projected dates are fluid.”
The deadline on Dec. 31, has yet to be missed since first being established in 1976, though officials say they hope to have it completed shortly after the New Year. But the bureau did not specify whether or not that will be met before inauguration day.
It’s hard not to find it suspicious that this is the first time in forty years the Census has missed a deadline – and one so consequential.
The Trump administration has remained fairly opaque as to how they would calculate adjusting the census by removing certain immigrants, which could be attributed to the Supreme Court’s dismissal of a lawsuit earlier this month, that attempted to block Trump’s plan. The 6-3 ruling found that “this case is riddled with contingencies and speculation that impede judicial review.”
President Trump previously tried and failed to have a citizenship question added to the Census. A citizenship question is considered common sense everywhere except among American Democrats. As the Heritage Foundation notes: “even the United Nations recommends that its member countries ask a citizenship question on their census surveys, and countries ranging from Australia to Germany to Indonesia all ask this question. Only in the U.S. is this considered at all controversial — and it shouldn’t be.”
Thomas Jefferson first proposed a citizenship question in 1800, which was added to the census in 1820. Every census since consistently asked citizenship questions up until 1950.
According to a study from the Center for Immigration Studies, illegal immigration will cause three House to be taken from Red States as a result of the 2020 Census’ lack of citizenship question (though Red States will still be net beneficiaries of seat changes overall due to citizens fleeing certain large Blue States). Those states that will lose seats are Alabama, Minnesota, and Ohio.
