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Donald Trump and his allies have the U.S. census in their sights as they continue to pursue their anti-democratic visions for the country.
Touring a controversial new immigrant detention center in Florida on Tuesday, Donald Trump excitedly backed a proposal from far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., that would drastically alter the U.S. electoral map if implemented. Greene said Monday that her proposal, which she said she will introduce in the House, would require the Census Bureau to “immediately” conduct a new census — even though the census takes place every 10 years, with the next one set for 2030.
“In conducting the new census of the U.S. population, it shall require questions determining the citizenship of each individual, and count US citizens only," Greene wrote in a post on X. "Upon completion of the census, the bill will direct states to immediately begin a redistricting of all U.S. House seats process using only the population of United States citizens."
Essentially, it would be an accelerated and further-reaching proposal than the bill House Republicans passed last year, which the Senate — controlled by Democrats at the time — didn't take up.
Speaking on behalf of himself and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who was standing beside him, Trump said Tuesday that they “love” the idea. He went on to frame the proposal as a response to his false claim that Democrats rigged the 2020 election by allowing “millions” of unauthorized voters to cast ballots.
DeSantis then accused the Biden administration of rigging apportionment to harm Republicans — an odd claim considering the ways the process seems to have benefited Republicans. (It's also odd that he called it the "Biden census," given that the last one was conducted during the first Trump administration.)
Greene’s Trump-backed proposal would amount to a nakedly political — and unconstitutional — assault on the apportionment process and, thus, the U.S. electoral system. And it would drag the nation one step closer to becoming the sort of “illiberal democracy” Hungary’s authoritarian leader, Viktor Orbán, has boasted of having in his country.
As writer and historian Brendan A. Shanahan wrote for Time magazine in April, such policies have been pursued by American white supremacists and other nativist types for centuries, despite the Constitution’s clear language on apportionment:
Then, as now, such measures have a fatal flaw at their core: the national constitution unequivocally requires that the ‘whole number’ of all residents in the country—regardless of citizenship status—be counted as part of the country’s population for the purposes of federal reapportionment. But congressional history also teaches that anti-alien bills, however unconstitutional, represent major roadblocks to the operation of federal reapportionment that can metastasize into a veritable constitutional crisis.
To me, this makes perfect sense. Members of Congress are hired to represent all the people who reside in their districts, who include people of varying immigration statuses. After all, citizens aren’t the only ones paying taxes in the United States, so — according to our nation’s founders — it follows that they shouldn’t be the only ones with representation in Congress, either.