Trump Poised to Remove Illegals from Census Calcuations

Let's take a break from today's Supreme Court decisions to talk about future Supreme Court decisions.

As you know, the Democrats insist on counting illegal aliens in their blue sanctuary states. This results in blue states and blue cities having more representation in Congress than a count of their legal US citizen-voters would dictate.

Some people estimate that this overcount of "citizens" results in Democrats having up to 27 representatives they're not entitled to.

Trump is ready to reverse this, says Ben Weingarten at Real Clear Investigations.

Following a years-long surge in illegal immigration, the Trump administration is poised to challenge a longstanding but legally fraught practice: counting illegal aliens in the U.S. census.

President Trump tried to end the practice during his first term, but President Biden overturned his predecessor's policy before it was implemented. Now, buoyed by red state attorneys general and Republican legislators, the second Trump administration is determined "to clean up the census and make sure that illegal aliens are not counted," White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller said last month.

What Miller didn't mention are the political implications of the administration's move. It could have significant political implications because the census count is used to apportion House seats, determine the number of votes each state gets in the Electoral College for selecting the president, and drive the flow of trillions of dollars in government funds.

Some immigration researchers project that including noncitizens in the census count disproportionately benefits Democratic states with large illegal alien populations. A recent study counters that, based on 2020 census figures, there would have been a negligible shift to the political map had the U.S. government excluded noncitizens from that count. But looking backward, those researchers found, red states would have benefited under the administration's desired census counting shift. Had authorities excluded such migrants from the 2010 census, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Ohio and North Carolina all would have gained one seat in the House, while California would have lost three seats, and Texas and Florida would have each lost one seat -- with the total number of Electoral College votes allotted each state changing accordingly.

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Trump's first term hints at what is to come if his administration vigorously pursues a citizen-centric census policy. In July 2020, when the president issued a memorandum to exclude illegal migrants from the census, blue states and immigration groups challenged it in court almost immediately.

Those challenges rose all the way to the Supreme Court. But it did not rule on the merits -- whether all residents must be counted and if the president has the authority to exclude nonresidents -- setting the stage for a battle over immigration and presidential power.

The census issue hinges on the Constitution's language, which calls for apportioning House seats among the states "according to their respective Numbers." Those "Numbers" originally included "free Persons" and "three-fifths of all other Persons" -- namely slaves, a result of the states' compromise. The framers excluded "Indians not taxed" -- Native Americans who were members of sovereign tribal nations, not citizens -- from the count.

After the Civil War, Congress passed the 14th Amendment to recognize the rights of the formerly enslaved. It states that congressional representation "shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State," again excluding Indians not taxed. Under the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, this population would be granted citizenship.

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Echoing arguments against birthright citizenship, critics on the right say that the 14th Amendment aimed to address the status of former slaves, not masses of illegal migrants. They assert that including this population in the census artificially skews political power, effectively disenfranchises citizens, and incentivizes states to adopt sanctuary policies protecting people here illegally.

"...[R]espect for the law and protection of the integrity of the democratic process warrant the exclusion of illegal aliens from the apportionment base, to the extent feasible and to the maximum extent of the President's discretion under the law," President Trump wrote in the 2020 memorandum.

I think the Supreme Court will, unfortunately, rule against Trump. Conservatives like Thomas and Alito are textualists, meaning they rule on, get this, what the law actually says and not what liberal justices wish it said. And in this case, the law speaks of counting "Persons," not "Citizens."

But give it a try.

And we really need to get the amendment process moving on both counting illegals as citizens and on birthright citizenship.

Weingarten has another recent article worth reading -- how Democrats are judge-shopping in their lawfare against Trump.

Most federal courts have a mix of judges appointed by Democrats and Republicans. The plaintiff's goal in forum shopping is to launch their suit in a district where they are more likely to draw a sympathetic justice -- ideally, this district would also include an appellate court stacked with like-minded judges.

To see whether Trump's adversaries are engaging in forum shopping, RealClearInvestigations analyzed 350 cases brought against the administration. We found that plaintiffs have brought 80% of those cases before just 11 of the nation's 91 district courts. While Democrat presidents have appointed roughly 60% of all active district court judges, each of the 11 district courts where the anti-Trump challenges have been clustered boasts an even higher percentage of Democrat appointees. In several of these venues, the administration's challengers are almost guaranteed that a judge picked by Joe Biden, Barack Obama, or Bill Clinton will preside over their case.

The analysis of these 350 cases, which covers all those identified in popular litigation trackers and RCI's independent research as of this week, lends credence to claims that anti-Trump litigants may be strategically filing suit in courts where they are most likely to receive a favorable ruling -- a practice that has been both pursued and decried by Democrats and Republicans.

RCI also analyzed three dozen cases in which judges imposed the most extreme restraint on the Trump administration by entering a nationwide or universal injunction -- prohibiting the administration from enforcing its policy not only against the party bringing the case, but anyone, everywhere. The analysis shows that these injunctions have disproportionately emerged from Democrat-leaning courts where plaintiffs have brought the lion's share of suits, and that Democrat-appointed judges are overwhelmingly responsible for ordering them.

posted by Ace at 04:10 PM

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