Thankfully we'll have President Biden to revert this silly nonsense next year. We were lucky the courts stopped it this year. https://apnews.com/8c4b824d0294ae37baf61ca31ae3ef67 California, Florida, Texas lose House seats with Trump order ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — If President Donald Trump succeeds in getting undocumented immigrants excluded from being counted in the redrawing of U.S. House districts, California, Florida and Texas would end up with one less congressional seat each than if every resident were counted, according to an analysis by a think tank. Without undocumented immigrants, California would lose two seats instead of one, Florida would gain one seat instead of two and Texas would gain two seats instead of three, according to the analysis by Pew Research Center. Additionally, the Pew analysis shows Alabama, Minnesota and Ohio would each keep a congressional seat they most likely would have lost during the process of divvying up congressional seats by state known as apportionment, which takes place after the U.S. Census Bureau completes its once-a-decade head count of every U.S. resident. The bureau currently is in the middle of the 2020 census. Federal law requires the Census Bureau to hand over the final head-count numbers used for apportionment to the president at the end of the year, but the bureau is asking Congress for an extension until next April 30 because of disruptions caused by the pandemic. Every resident of a state is traditionally counted during apportionment, but Trump last Tuesday issued a directive seeking to bar people in the U.S. illegally from being included in the headcount as congressional districts are redrawn. Trump said including them in the count “would create perverse incentives and undermine our system of government.” At least four lawsuits or notices of a legal challenge have been filed seeking to halt the directive. The president’s directive breaks with almost 250 years of tradition and is unconstitutional, according to a lawsuit filed by Common Cause, the city of Atlanta and others in federal court in the District of Columbia. Other challenges have been filed or are in the process of being brought by the ACLU on behalf of immigrant rights groups, a coalition of states led New York Attorney General Letitia James and civil rights groups already suing the Trump administration over an effort to gather citizenship data through administrative records. The Democratic-led House Committee on Oversight and Reform is asking Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Census Bureau director Steven Dillingham and other officials to testify about the Republican president’s directive at a hearing next Wednesday.
BTW -- the current Census self-response rates can be found here... https://2020census.gov/en/response-rates.html Generally self-response by the self-response web portal is going very well nationally. They stated earlier that a national on-line (excluding phone call-ins) self-response rate above 50% would be considered to be a success at this point in the Census and save the cost of sending an enumerator to the person's home to take the Census information. The current 2020 decennial Census self-response rate is 63.1%. The final self-response rate for the paper Census in 2010 was 74%. However this 74% is after visits from enumerators placing notes on doors, etc. -- The non-response follow-up by enumerators (door knocking) for the 2020 Census starts on August 11th. Generally the Census process appears to be ahead of schedule at this point in terms of the number of collected responses. The current plan is to end the Census collection at the end of September rather than the end of October - which is causing controversy. However it should be noted that most other Census collections in the U.S. only allowed approx. two months for the NRFU (Non-Response Follow-Up) period. For example, NRFU in 2010 started on May 1st and ended on July 10th. The NRFU period for 2020 is starting on August 11th and ending on September 30th. Admittedly this 2020 NRFU period is shorter than 2010 by a few days; likewise an October 31st end date would have been longer by a few days. Even ending a month early the projected total response percentage is expected to be slightly greater than any recent Census in decades. While the 2020 online response rate appeared to get off to slow start back in April (over-shadowed by COVID) -- it quickly climbed as more post card reminders were sent and TV commercials were aired.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/03/census-bureau-data-trump-391146 Census Bureau will finish count earlier than expected, deliver data to Trump The bureau’s director says it “continues its work on meeting the requirements” of the president’s request to exclude undocumented immigrants. The Census Bureau said late on Monday that it would finish collecting data for the decennial count next month and work to deliver population tallies to President Donald Trump that meet his constitutionally questionable order to exclude undocumented immigrants for the purpose of congressional apportionment. The agency, which is part of the Commerce Department, had said this spring that it would require more time to complete its data collection because of the coronavirus pandemic. But amid a renewed push by Trump to remove those in the country without documentation from the count, Census Bureau Director Steven Dillingham now says the data will be sent to the president by the end of the year — and not next spring, when Joe Biden could be in the Oval Office. In a statement on Monday, Dillingham — who declined to tell Congress last week whether an extension was still necessary — announced measures meant “to accelerate the completion of data collection and apportionment counts by our statutory deadline of December 31, 2020, as required by law and directed by the Secretary of Commerce.” In order to meet that deadline, Dillingham said, “field data collection” will conclude by Sept. 30. Professional staff at the bureau has said that finishing the count by the end of next month is not possible after a pandemic-prompted delay in operations earlier this year. Dillingham also said the bureau “continues its work on meeting the requirements” of two Trump orders: a July 2019 executive order that asked administrative agencies to collect data on undocumented immigrants in order to provide counts that states could use to draw state legislative maps that did not include those people; and a presidential memorandum from last month instructing the Census Bureau to calculate apportionment counts — the number of congressional seats each state will have in the next decade — without undocumented immigrants included. “A team of experts are examining methodologies and options to be employed for this purpose,” Dillingham said. Excluding these immigrants would likely benefit Republicans in future elections for Congress and the presidency. According to the University of Virginia Center for Politics, a count that did not include undocumented immigrants would mean California would lose two House seats, not the one seat the state is projected to lose in the next decade. Fast-growing Texas, increasingly a competitive state, would gain two seats instead of three. New Jersey would lose a seat. Alabama and Ohio, meanwhile, would each gain a seat under a count that excluded undocumented immigrants — though they are not currently projected to gain seats under a conventional count. Democrats and other groups have already moved to challenge Trump’s recent order, arguing that the Constitution does not allow the census to count some people in the country for the purposes of House apportionment and not others based on immigration status. The 14th Amendment says the House seats should be divided among the states “according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed.” In his memorandum last month, Trump wrote that the Constitution “has never been understood to include in the apportionment base every individual physically present within a State’s boundaries at the time of the census. Instead, the term ‘persons in each State’ has been interpreted to mean that only the ‘inhabitants’ of each State should be included. Determining which persons should be considered ‘inhabitants‘ for the purpose of apportionment requires the exercise of judgment.“ Eric Holder, a former attorney general under President Barack Obama who leads the National Democratic Redistricting Committee and its affiliated nonprofit, said last month that Trump’s order “clearly” violated the Constitution. “This latest scheme is nothing more than a partisan attempt at manipulating the census to benefit the president’s allies, but it plainly violates the U.S. Constitution and federal laws, and cannot stand,” said Holder, whose nonprofit group is supporting a lawsuit seeking to halt the administration’s move. Trump has made numerous efforts to exclude undocumented immigrants from the count for the purposes of political representation. After the Supreme Court smacked down a move to add a citizenship question to the census last year, Trump‘s 2019 order asked other government agencies to provide data on citizenship that could be used to create a count of noncitizens. At the time, administration officials said citizenship data could be used by the states to draw state legislative districts of equal population of citizens instead of all people — which would likely shift power from more densely populated cities to rural areas. Like many aspects of public- and private-sector organizations, the coronavirus outbreak has roiled the Census Bureau‘s operations.In April, the bureau asked Congress to delay the requirement to submit apportionment data until the end of April 2021. But since then — as Trump’s poll numbers have faltered — the administration has pushed to meet its original deadlines. At a hearing last week before the Democratic-controlled House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Dillingham repeatedly declined to say whether the bureau stood by its original request for an extension. The House has already approved a provision extending the deadline. But the Republican coronavirus relief proposal in the Senate, on which the chamber has not acted, did not include an extension. According to Dillingham’s statement, “nearly 63 percent of all households” have completed the census thus far. “We will improve the speed of our count without sacrificing completeness,“ Dillingham said, adding that the bureau would “provide awards“ to employees “in recognition of those who maximize hours worked.“
Federal Judge Bars Trump Administration From Ending Census Early The ruling says the census, which was delayed for months because of the coronavirus, needs more time to get an accurate count. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/25/us/trump-census-deadline.html A federal judge barred the Trump administration on Friday from ending the 2020 census a month early, the latest twist in years of political and legal warfare over perhaps the most contested population count in a century. In U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Judge Lucy H. Koh issued a preliminary injunction preventing the administration from winding down the count by Sept. 30, a month before the scheduled completion date of Oct. 31. She also barred officials from delivering completed population data to the White House on Dec. 31 rather than the April 2021 delivery date that had previously been set out. The judge had temporarily stayed the early completion of the census count on Sept. 5 pending a hearing held on Tuesday. The ruling came after evidence filed this week showed that top Census Bureau officials believed ending the head count early would seriously endanger its accuracy. In one July email, the head of census field operations, Timothy P. Olson Jr., called it “ludicrous” to think a curtailed population count would succeed. A second internal document drafted in late July said a shortened census would have “fatal data flaws that are unacceptable for a constitutionally mandated national activity.” The administration ordered the speedup anyway. Critics immediately said it would lead to drastic undercounts, particularly for low-income areas and communities of color, which are least likely to respond to the census. The Trump administration had argued that it needed to end census-taking early to begin processing state-by-state population data or it would miss a statutory Dec. 31 deadline for sending population figures to President Trump. That was widely seen as an effort to ensure that Mr. Trump — and not Joseph R. Biden Jr., should he win the presidential election — controls census figures that will be used next year to reallocate seats in the House of Representatives and draw thousands of political boundaries nationwide. Mr. Trump had formally asked Congress this spring to extend the December deadline to April 2021, citing delays in the census caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The Democratic-controlled House registered its approval, but the Republican-controlled Senate has not acted on the request, leaving the administration leeway to order the shorter count. Mr. Trump ordered in July that unauthorized immigrants be removed from population totals used for reapportionment, a move that would create a whiter, less urban and presumably more Republican population base for distributing House seats. His directive has already been rejected as illegal by a federal court, a ruling the Justice Department said it will appeal. In a 78 page opinion, Judge Koh said that a mound of internal Commerce Department and Census Bureau documents showed that both agencies knew the earlier deadlines could not be met without a high risk of creating a flawed population count. They also knew that the pandemic gave them ample legal justification for missing the December deadline for delivering data to the president, she wrote. Yet their only explanation for shortening the census, she said, was a two-page press release issued on Aug 3 that said the December deadline had to be met. “The Aug. 3 press release never explains why defendants are ‘required by law’ to follow a statutory deadline that would sacrifice constitutionally and statutorily required interests in accuracy,” Judge Koh wrote. The Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, did not immediately react to the ruling. Most others with a stake in the accuracy of the count — cities and states, businesses, advocates of underrepresented minorities — said giving the bureau more time was essential to ensuring that the count be even reasonably accurate. “Today’s decision is a victory for data quality,” said the incoming president of the American Statistical Association, Rob Santos. “It’s vitally important to give the hard-working census employees the time to ensure as fair and accurate a census as possible.” Judge Koh’s order offered some breathing room for a Census Bureau that has been struggling to manage what was supposed to be the most accurate population count ever, conducted largely over the internet and aided by an army of census takers equipped with iPhones. Instead, this year’s census has been a star-crossed exercise, pushed far behind schedule by the coronavirus pandemic, stymied by clumsy software and so mired in Republican political strategizing that even former directors of the Census Bureau have called the entire count into question. Even this week, the government’s sole witness in the lawsuit, Albert E. Fontenot Jr., the associate director for decennial census programs, said in a deposition that the pandemic, western wildfires and major storms in the South posed “significant risks to complete all states by September 30.” Despite those hurdles, the Census Bureau says it has finished counting more than 96 percent of the nation’s households, theoretically placing it in reach of its stated goal of 99 percent by the end of the month. But whether that can be done — or done accurately — remains in great doubt. Nationwide, the completion rate varies widely, with four states above the 99 percent goal. Six states remain below 90 percent and are considered poor candidates to be completed by month’s end. Beyond that, the reported completion rates are an unreliable barometer of the census’s accuracy because a household can be deemed counted in many ways, with wildly varying precision. The rates do not show the share of households that have been counted by highly reliable methods like internet or in-person interviews, versus by dicier means like asking a neighbor or relying on personal information from a database. On Monday, the inspector general of the Commerce Department said the compressed schedule threatened the reliability of both the head count and the data processing and error checks that follow it. The report quoted unnamed senior census officials as saying the early deadlines have forced shortcuts in reviews of data and other quality-assurance steps that ensure a reliable population count. The report also said the Census Bureau was forced to shave a month off its head count because it had been ordered by unnamed higher-ups in the Trump administration to deliver data to the White House by Dec. 31, and could devise no other way to meet that goal. At least one senior Census Bureau official appeared convinced this summer that even a shortened count would not free up sufficient time to deliver a credible count. “Any thinking person who would believe we can deliver apportionment by 12/31,” Mr. Olson, the executive running daily census operations, wrote in a July 23 email, “has either a mental deficiency or a political motivation.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-census-idUSKBN2890F4 U.S. Supreme Court weighs Trump bid to bar illegal immigrants from census totals WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Supreme Court on Monday is set to take up President Donald Trump's unprecedented and contentious effort to exclude illegal immigrants from the population totals used to allocate U.S. House of Representatives districts to states. The challengers to Trump's July directive include various states led by New York, cities, counties and immigrant rights groups. They have argued that the Republican president's move could leave several million people uncounted and cause California, Texas and New Jersey to lose House seats, which are based on a state's population count in the decennial census.
This is a good thing... What exactly are you predicting? Are you predicting the court will say that illegal immigrants have to be included in the census? If you were to ask me... I don't know what they will conclude... but if I were deciding... I don't think it is internally consistent to include people who are non citizens and don't have the right to vote in the data you use to allocate House of Representative seats. So... I think the data should be split out... Citizen and non citizen. So if congress wants to give resources to states based total population they can... But... a state does not get more sets in the House for those people. Finally in the decision I would also discuss how we treat those who lost the right vote. Regrading dreamers... that should be dealt with in the legislation.
if the new righties are "Constitutionalist textualists/originalists", the answer is clear. I think they're hypocrites though, so the answer isn't clear
so here is the text... show us where it is clear... understand there may be a difference between a Constitutional person and a moral person... Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct. The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative;