The attorneys general of New York and Connecticut were among those from 21 states, along with 10 cities, six counties and the U.S. Conference of Mayors winning a federal lawsuit against the Trump administration that dealt with the current U.S. Census.
The decision by three-judge panel in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York was handed down yesterday.
The lawsuit, filed in July, sought to stop President Trump, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and others from implementing a memorandum that Trump issued.
Complying with the Trump memorandum would have affected congressional apportionment by excluding undocumented immigrants from being counted in the base of people used to determine how many seats in the House of Representatives each state should have.
The U.S. Constitution and federal statutes require that a census taken every 10 years count the “whole number of persons” residing in the country. Nothing is said about the immigration status of any of those persons. In the case of California, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, it was estimated that what the Trump Administration was trying to do would have excluded more than two-million people from the count and resulted in a loss of two or three Congressional seats for the state.
The judges ruled that the president”™s plan to exclude undocumented immigrants from the apportionment base was unlawful. In the decision, the court held that President Trump was violating the law by seeking to change the apportionment base, and that “the President must act in accordance with, and within the boundaries of, the authority that Congress has granted.”
It concluded the “Presidential Memorandum is a violation of Congress”™s delegation of its constitutional responsibility to count the whole number of persons in each State and to apportion members of the House of Representatives among the States according to their respective numbers under.”
The judges also noted there could be other effects, such as in the distribution of federal funds and in other governmental decision-making based on census results.
The judges also seemed to take a poke at those in the Trump administration, including Trump himself, who believe that the powers of the president are unlimited.
“The Constitution gives to Congress the authority to regulate the census and to reapportion the House,” the judges wrote. “In exercising that authority, and delegating responsibility to the Executive Branch, Congress adopted a different theory of Government, in which the House of Representatives represents the whole population, not a subset of the population, and there is ”˜equal representation for equal numbers of people.”™ The President is not free to substitute his own view of what is most ”˜consonant with the principles of representative democracy”™ for the view that Congress already chose.”
The court said that the statutory command to use the “whole number of persons in each State” as the apportionment base does not give the president discretion to exclude illegal aliens on the basis of their legal status, without regard for their residency.
New York”™s Attorney General Letitia James said, “President Trump”™s repeated attempts to hinder, impair and prejudice an accurate census and the subsequent apportionment have failed once again. …We cannot allow the White House”™s constant fearmongering and xenophobia to stop us from being counted. We urge everyone to fill out the census, if they have not already, and we will continue to take every legal action available to ensure all communities are counted, all communities are properly represented, and all communities get the federal funding they need and deserve.”
