John Baker and Elliott Stonecipher have a must read Op Ed in today’s Wall Street Journal… In short the 2010 Census is set to count all persons physically in the country, including millions of illegal aliens, resulting in states like California that have high illegal alien populations to unconstitutionally increasing their representation in congress while other states that have lower illegal alien populations are denied their rightful political representation:
Next year’s census will determine the apportionment of House members and Electoral College votes for each state. To accomplish these vital constitutional purposes, the enumeration should count only citizens and persons who are legal, permanent residents. But it won’t.
Instead, the U.S. Census Bureau is set to count all persons physically present in the country—including large numbers who are here illegally. The result will unconstitutionally increase the number of representatives in some states and deprive some other states of their rightful political representation. Citizens of “loser” states should be outraged. Yet few are even aware of what’s going on.
In 1790, the first Census Act provided that the enumeration of that year would count “inhabitants” and “distinguish” various subgroups by age, sex, status as free persons, etc. Inhabitant was a term with a well-defined meaning that encompassed, as the Oxford English Dictionary expressed it, one who “is a bona fide member of a State, subject to all the requisitions of its laws, and entitled to all the privileges which they confer.”
Thus early census questionnaires generally asked a question that got at the issue of citizenship or permanent resident status, e.g., “what state or foreign country were you born in?” or whether an individual who said he was foreign-born was naturalized. Over the years, however, Congress and the Census Bureau have added inquiries that have little or nothing to do with census’s constitutional purpose.
Lets not mice words here… The Obama Administration and Democrats in Congress will willingly turn a bind eye to the Constitution for simple reason counting illegal aliens helps the Democrat Party. It allows them to add House seats in states like California where their political machine already dominates while disenfranchising Republican districts in other states.