SOUND AND FURY ON THE CENSUS
If you took a poll of U.S. Rep. Chuck Fleischmann’s constituents, you would undoubtedly find majority support for the Equal Representation Act which he is co-sponsoring.
The measure seeks to nullify the inclusion of noncitizens in the count that determines congressional districts and the Electoral College map used to decide the outcome of presidential elections; requires that the Census Bureau return a citizenship question to the decennial census (as had been in place for most of the country’s history); and mandates that the Census Bureau publicly report on certain demographic data.
Unfortunately, with a recalcitrant Republican House with a minuscule majority, a Democratic Senate and a Democrat in the White House, the bill has no chance of passing.
But in Washington, D.C., you go through the motions of seeing the bill through committees, send out a news release about the congressman’s support (which occurred Wednesday) and hope the folks back home will see the effort as their representative fighting for them.
However, the folks back home can’t vote on the bill, so it’s one more bill that sounds good but goes nowhere.
Oh, we don’t blame Fleischmann, R-Ooltewah. His news release describes him as “a leading border security advocate in Congress,” and we don’t doubt that he fully believes in what the bill seeks to do.
After all, it seems fair that the millions who have poured through the country’s Southern border since Joe Biden became president — enough to equal the population of Massachusetts, we read this week — shouldn’t get to count in the various ways to represent the country.
Indeed, over-representation of certain states was one of the concerns the Founding Fathers had before they crafted the Constitution that called for both a Senate which had the same number of representatives from each state and a House which had representatives based on population.
Ah, but there’s the rub — the ole Constitution.
The Constitution, for census purposes, requires the counting of “persons,” and the 14th Amendment states that the House shall be apportioned “according to their respective numbers, counting the whole numbers of persons in each State.” The latter phrase, of course, hearkened back to the adoption of the Constitution when, reprehensibly, slaves were counted as 3/5ths of a person.
However, supporters of the Equal Representation Act say Congress has the authority to define “persons” as citizens and thus count only citizens for apportionment or the Electoral College map.
Fleischmann, who released a statement Wednesday about his sponsorship on a day the bill was to be marked up the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, used the usual boilerplate — though factual — rhetoric about Biden’s immigration failures.
“Since Day 1 of this Administration,” he said in a news release, “President Biden and D.C. Democrats have gone out of their way to open our borders and incentivize millions of illegal aliens to break into our country. … For every illegal immigrant that is counted towards congressional apportionment or the allocation of Electoral College votes, a legal American citizen is disenfranchised of their right to be properly represented.
” … By including illegals in the Census Bureau’s count, American citizens nationwide are disenfranchised, and confidence in our elections and governing institutions is diminished. I am proud to support this commonsense bill that not only protects every American’s right to be properly represented in their government but will also help disincentivize illegal immigrants to make the journey to come to our county and illegally cross our borders.”
The bill is also co-sponsored by Tennessee U.S. Reps. Diana Harshbarger, Scott DesJarlais, Andrew Ogles, John Rose and Mark Green, and, among others, Georgia U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
U.S. Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-Tennessee, is the primary sponsor in the Senate. He and other senators said in January they felt the need to sponsor the bill when video revealed a Democratic congresswoman openly calling for more illegal immigration to her New York district because she “needs more people in her district for redistricting purposes.”
“It is unconscionable that illegal immigrants and noncitizens are counted toward Congressional district apportionment and our electoral map,” the Tennessee senator said at the time. “While people continue to flee Democratrun cities, desperate Democrats are back-filling the mass exodus with illegal immigrants so that they do not lose their seats in Congress and maintain electoral votes for the Presidency and hence artificially boost their political power, which in turn dilutes the power of other Americans’ votes.”
Sadly, no matter the veracity of Fleischmann’s and Hagerty’s statements, the only action a bill like theirs will see is to become a part of the Congressional Record.