Republicans renew a bid to remove noncitizens from the census tally behind voting maps

Yet again, for partisan advantage:

Republicans in Congress are reviving a controversial push to alter a key set of census numbers that are used to determine how presidents and members of the U.S. House of Representatives are elected.

Ratified after the Civil War, the 14th Amendment says the “whole number of persons in each state” must be included in what are called apportionment counts, the population numbers based on census results that determine each state’s share of House seats and Electoral College votes for a decade.

But GOP lawmakers have now released three bills this year that would use the 2030 census to tally residents without U.S. citizenship, and then subtract some or all of them from the apportionment counts. Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee unveiled the latest bill Monday.

Any attempt to carry out the unprecedented exclusion of millions of noncitizens from the apportionment counts of the 2030 census is likely to undermine the head count’s accuracy and face legal challenges, as the first Trump administration did in its failed push for similar changes for the 2020 census.

How the three bills would reshape election maps for Congress and president

More than a year ago, the GOP-controlled House narrowly passed a bill to leave out noncitizens from apportionment counts, though a divided Congress ultimately stymied that push. The current Republican trifecta, however, has opened up the possibility of getting similar legislation over the finish line.

The latest measure in Congress is a funding bill that would ban the Census Bureau from including noncitizens without legal status in the 2030 apportionment counts. A House Appropriations subcommittee is set to vote Tuesday on whether to advance the bill.

The other two bills — one reintroduced in June by Sen. Bill Hagerty of Tennessee and another in January by Rep. Chuck Edwards of North Carolina — call for a broader group to be left out: all noncitizens, including green-card and visa holders.

Source: Republicans renew a bid to remove noncitizens from the census tally behind voting maps