Originally by Jim Saksa at www.democracydocket.com
Unsatisfied with norm-busting mid-decade partisan gerrymanders, House Republicans are now laying down the intellectual groundwork for an unlawful mid-decade census.
At a House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government hearing Wednesday, Republicans claimed counting noncitizens and statistical errors in the 2020 Census justified a recount to give the GOP more seats in Congress, even though federal law prohibits a mid-decade census being used for apportionment.
“These errors are impossible to correct without an entirely new census,” said Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.), the subcommittee chairman.
“The 2020 Census should be called the sanctuary census,” Roy said. “Just like sanctuary jurisdictions, the 2020 Census unconstitutionally put illegal aliens ahead of American citizens.”
The Apportionment Clause of the Constitution calls for congressional seats to be divided among the states according to their populations, “counting the whole number of persons in each State.”
President Donald Trump was serving his first term in 2020, and his Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, oversaw the decennial census that year. Courts blocked an attempt to reinstate a citizenship question on that year’s census, holding that the administration failed to follow procedural laws.
Despite that, Trump has repeatedly called for a redo of 2020’s count that would exclude undocumented immigrants. Congress would need to appropriate funds for a mid-decade census and amend standing statutes to allow that count to be used to reapportion congressional seats among the states.
The hearing echoed ongoing, Republican-led lawsuits challenging the 2020 census’ methodologies and inclusion of noncitizens in the count, which subcommittee ranking member Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pa.) described as “part of a larger scheme, one MAGA extremists have designed, to redraw maps mid decade in a blatant power grab so that Republicans can win more seats in Congress and keep their majority despite the increasing unpopularity of their Project 2025 agenda.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the ranking member of the full House Judiciary Committee, warned that Wednesday’s hearing, like the lawsuits, were pretextual attempts to justify Republicans’ push for mid-decade reapportionment and redistricting.
“Our democracy and our society cannot afford our constitutional census being turned into a constant instrument of partisan conflict, division, and advantage,” Raskin said.
If anything, Raskin said, the census undercounts children and minorities. “The actual institutional weakness of the census, as the [Government Accountability Office] reported, is the chronic undercount of communities of color, which persisted through the 2020 Census,” he said.
The 2024 GAO report found that, while the overall count was accurate, the 2020 Census undercounted Black people, Hispanic people, young children and renters, while overcounting White people, adults over 50 years old, and homeowners.
According to Roy, removing noncitizens from the census count would shift 12 congressional seats to predominantly Republican states. He also claimed a statistical methodology called differential privacy — a masking of a person’s attributes by swapping some at the individual level to prevent the identification of any specific person — shifted 6 House seats to Democratic-leaning states.
But, as John C. Yang, president of Asian Americans Advancing Justice – AAJC, noted in his testimony, differential privacy was not used at the state level — meaning it was not used to affect congressional apportionment.
Differential privacy was first utilized by the Trump administration in 2020, replacing another personal information masking method that census officials feared wasn’t robust enough to fend off Big Tech’s attempts to glean individuals’ private data from more granular census reports.
While disagreeing over its impact, Democrats and Republicans alike seemed concerned with the potential errors introduced by the new methods. “We all want, as the Chair suggests, our census picture to be fuller and more accurate. It’s what our democracy demands, and we should all strive to improve our data collection and prevent undercounts as we look forward to the scheduled, regular 2030 Census,” Scanlon said. “But to make that a reality, we should be talking about reforms that limit the executive branch’s ability to interfere in the account for political purposes, or reforms to ensure that the Census Bureau has adequate funding and flexibility to do the job right.”
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