On November 5, the U.S.Senate rejected an amendment by Senator Robert Bennett (R-Utah) that would have provided that seats be apportioned in the U.S. House on the basis of how many citizens live in each state, instead of how many persons live in each state. See this story.
It is dismaying that 39 U.S. Senators can support such a proposal, when the 14th amendment, section 2, says “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.” It is also disappointing that newspaper reporters write fairly lengthy stories about this issue and don’t mention the constitutional language.
A senator quoting the constitution. How odd.
It is not as clear-cut a constitutional issue as you portray. The language in the 14th Section 2 is identical in function to that in the original constitution as far as who is counted. Subsequent to the 13th Amendment, the 3/5 clause was as immaterial as the “Indians not taxed” clause is today.
The purpose of the repetition of the apportionment language was two-fold. It separated the formula for apportioning direct taxes from that for apportioning representatives, and it is introductory to the rest of the Section 2 (which you didn’t quote or indicate that you had abridged), which provides for an adjustment of the apportionment for disenfranchisement of certain persons (of non-felon, non-rebel, citizen males over the age of 21).
Congress envisioned that States might reduce the franchise using literacy or property tests, such that the electorate in the South would be no different than in the antebellum period, but the number of representatives would be increased because of the effect of the 13th Amendment. So under the 14th Amendment. if a State set higher barriers to voting, their representation would be proportionately decreased. And Congress also did not want to reduce direct taxes on the basis of persons being disenfranchised.
They didn’t have anything against such tests per se, but didn’t want them to be applied wholesale such that States would get more representation, while simultaneously reducing the number of persons who were choosing the representatives. During the debate on the 1872 apportionment bill (the first following passage of the 14th Amendment) the debate clearly recognized that representation should be reduced in proportion to the number of adult citizen males disenfranchised on the basis of illiteracy, imbecility, or idiocy, while also acknowledging that such tests were legitimate restrictions on voting.
If Congress were serious about enforcing the 14th Amendment, the census would not only ask a citizenship question, but it would also ask respondents whether they were registered to vote, and whether they had been barred from voting in any election including a partisan primary due to their decision not to declare a political affiliation. While it is not unlawful to have State-mandated partisan primaries, so long as they do not discriminate on the of race, sex, or age over 18, it is unconstitutional to apportion representatives on the basis of citizen males over the age of 21 having their right to vote abridged, such as by a partisan test.
Now back to the Bennett amendment (and S. 1688). It would base apportionment of the basis of persons lawfully present in the USA. While all US citizens are lawfully present in this country, only some non-citizens are. Please correct your news item.
The original Constitution did not use the word “in”, but simply referred to “respective numbers”. I doubt that any meaning can be attributed to the inclusion of the word “in” in the 14th Amendment, especially since Congress has included persons who are clearly not “in” a State with a State’s apportionment count. So we either have to use a meaning of “in” that is so broad as to be meaningless, or simply go with “respective numbers”.
Since the 1790 Census, Congress has counted persons on the basis of “usual residence” for enumerating what the Supreme Court in Franklin v Massachusetts referred to as “state affiliation”. So the question is whether “illegal immigrants” have any more affiliation with respect to a State than do tourists or other transients. It is reasonable to assume that the US Supreme Court would defer to the judgment of Congress with respect to the details of how the Census and apportionment are conducted.
Isn’t it rather bizarre that Congress inflates the representation of States beyond its corresponding electorate – which was the whole intent of the apportionment clause in the 14th Amendment; yet at the same time Congress requires States to permit overseas residents to vote for congressmen yet fails to include those overseas residents in a determination of how many congressmen they may vote for?
Very simple — the whole number of LEGAL persons (U.S.A. citizens, taxed Indians, legal aliens undergoing the naturalization process).
The Indians not taxed was a reference to the political fact of life that such nontaxed Indians were deemed to be internally *foreign* folks.
Sorry — illegal ALIEN/foreign folks in the area of ANY regime are ENEMY invaders.
No different than the ALIEN foreign tribal invaders in the Roman Empire for centuries — before the R.E. fell in 476 A.D. — unable to keep the BARBARIANS out.
Sorry — not too many illegal ALIEN/foreign folks in the U.S.A. in 1866-1868 at the time of the 14th Amdt — with the Union Army still in many States and watching the borders.
Also — NOT too many temporary foreign tourists / business persons in the U.S.A. on early census dates.
Spare me and the list any of the standard communist *politically correct* stuff about ILLEGAL ALIENS in the U.S.A.
The party hack Supremes are of course likely standard brain dead on the subject — in being NOT able to detect any historical background regarding the ENGLISH language in the Constitution.
See the F.E.C. Federal Election stats — lots of reps in the ghetto gerrymander districts get elected with much lower votes than the average — due to lots of ILLEGAL ALIENS being counted in such gerrymander districts.
See CA and TX for example.
The census is of course INSTANTLY obsolete when reported — due to about 10-15 percent of the population moving around each year.
The 2 Senators per State is of course INTOLERABLE in a regime claiming to a *Democracy*.
In other words, the entire gerrymander system in the U.S.A. is ONE giant political timebomb — now quite ready to go off — when some top arrogant party hack MORON shoots off his or her extremist mouth.
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Uniform definition of Elector in all of the U.S.A.
P.R. and nonpartisan A.V.
Repeal ALL the accumulated negative langauge.