With No Final Say, Trump Wants to Change Who Counts for Dividing Up Congress' Seats

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for guy_:

With No Final Say, Trump Wants To Change Who Counts For Dividing Up Congress' Seats:

President Trump released a memorandum Tuesday that calls for an unprecedented change to the constitutionally mandated count of every person living in the country - the exclusion of unauthorized immigrants from the numbers used to divide up seats in Congress among the states.

The memo instructs Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the Commerce Department, to include in the legally required report of census results to the president "information permitting the President, to the extent practicable" to leave out the number of immigrants living in the U.S. without authorization from the apportionment count.

But the move by the president, who does not have final authority over the census, is more likely to spur legal challenges and political spectacle in the last months before this year's presidential election than a transformation of the once-a-decade head count, which has been disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.

[...] Since the first U.S. census in 1790, both U.S. citizens and noncitizens - regardless of immigration status - have been included in the country's official population counts.

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