Census Citizenship Question Back in The House

A bill to add a citizenship question to the Census has been reintroduced in the U.S. House of Representatives. The bill mirrors an attempt made under the previous Trump administration, which was rejected by the Supreme Court and expressly forbidden by one of the first acts of the Biden Presidency.

Trump's administration sought in 2019 to ask all recipients a citizenship question on the 2020 census - the first time such a question would have appeared since 1950. In June the US Supreme Court rejected the attempt, which the Insights Association had already denounced, arguing that it could deter responses from immigrants and result in minorities being undercounted. This in turn might mean electoral boundaries would be redrawn and billions of dollars of funding withheld from vulnerable communities, according to critics. Trump in turn argued that 'Only in America' could a government be barred from asking participants in its national Census whether or not they were citizens - and attempted to delay the Census in order to dispute the point further. One of Joe Biden's first acts in January 2021 was to sign an executive order preventing the exclusion of undocumented immigrants from Census Bureau data.

With the return of the Republicans imminent, Representative Chuck Edwards (R-NC-11) reintroduced a bill on Friday - the Equal Representation Act (H.R. 151), which would 'require reporting on certain census statistics, and modify apportionment of Representatives to be based on United States citizens instead of all persons'.

The text of the proposed legislation is not yet available at the time of going to press. To date, the bill has 16 Republican co-sponsors, and has been referred to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform for further consideration.

Web site: www.census.gov .