Amid redistricting fervor in states across the U.S., President Donald Trump is now calling for a mid-decade census to be conducted. The president has no legal ability to demand a new census, but he has ordered the Commerce Department to start working on a mid-decade census that would exclude people who are in the United States without legal status — in hopes of rigging midterm elections to favor Republicans.
That move would be both illegal and unconstitutional, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. Philip Rocco is an associate professor of political science at Marquette University and the author of a new book about the 2020 census, called Counting Like a State. He joins Lake Effect’s Joy Powers to talk about practical and legal obstacles to conducting a mid-decade census.
“The census is just kind of one piece of the puzzle here; the goal is to lock in your power for as long as possible,” Rocco says. “There are a lot of different routes to that goal.”
What the U.S. Constitution says about the census
Rocco highlights Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution as a first legal obstacle toTrump’s proposed census. The Constitution grants the authority to conduct a census exclusively to Congress, not the executive branch. It also provides a timetable for the census.
“Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution says that [counting] residents of the United States for apportionment purposes — for the purposes of apportioning Congress, and thus the Electoral College — happens once every 10 years, not on an arbitrary schedule,” he explains.
Rocco also says Trump’s calls to exclude people without legal status from the count go against the 14th Amendment. It requires that representatives be apportioned “according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state.”
“If you go back to the debates over the 14th amendment, there were people at the time who wanted only citizens to count for apportionment,” Rocco says. “But Congress explicitly rejected those amendments in the debate.”
Other obstacles
Title 13 of the U.S. Code outlines how the census should be conducted and offers an additional legal obstacle. Congress in 1973 amended Title 13 to allow for a mid-decade census — but only for data collection, not the apportionment of Congress.
And even if Trump can jump through the necessary legal barriers, Rocco says his plan faces logistical obstacles as well.
“Practically speaking, you have to think about taking a census of the United States population costs about $13.7 billion and takes typically an entire decade to plan,” he says.
Rocco says that an illegal census by the Trump administration could have dire consequences for Wisconsin.
“If Wisconsin’s population were undercounted by 1% — that’s about 50,000 people — that would have the consequence of hundreds of millions of dollars year-over-year lost from federal funds, so huge consequences fiscally for us,” he says.
