Census fight gets personal
President Trump’s latest attack on the census makes explicit his abiding preoccupation with deeming large swaths of humanity inferior based on race, nationality, belief and other disqualifications for membership in his counterenlightenment. His declared intent to exclude undocumented immigrants from the decennial count is predicated on the assertion that certain people are not people at all— and that he should serve as our selfappointed arbiter of personhood.
The president signed a memorandum this week explaining that the administration would drop “aliens who are not in a lawful immigration status” from this year’s census result for the purpose of apportioning House seats. That would likely reduce the number of representatives allotted to California and other Democraticleaning states.
The fortunes of Trump’s party in the past congressional election, which don’t look likely to improve in the next, may have helped reduce him to this desperate bid to reshape Congress by presidential fiat. But his obsession with altering the official tally of Americans dates at least to his earliest days in office.
Before the administration was two weeks old, it was taking steps to add a citizenship question to the census that was widely expected to discourage immigrant participation. Trump has repeatedly targeted the count by other means since the Supreme Court turned back the effort to add the question, having found the administration’s stated rationale for it “contrived.”
The president’s memo, by contrast, makes a blunt and disconcerting case. The postCivil War 14th Amendment requires that congressional “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State.” Trump decrees that when he transmits the census results to Congress as required by law, he will take it upon himself to omit “illegal aliens” from the count on the theory that they are not among said “persons.”
The apportionment provision at issue was adopted to supersede the Constitution’s infamous designation of every slave as threefifths of a person for political purposes and to accord every inhabitant of the states full representation. The president is now effectively arguing that this historical correction was a mistake.