GOP Advances Bill Limiting Census Counts For Congressional Seats to Citizens

Republicans on the House Oversight Committee advanced a blatantly unconstitutional bill Tuesday to exclude noncitizens from the decennial census counts.

The legislation, introduced by Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-N.C.), would require a citizenship question on the census starting in 2030, and then limit apportionment — the divvying of 435 congressional seats across the states and the corresponding allocation in the Electoral College — to just citizens. 

If enacted, the proposal would contravene the U.S. Constitution, which calls for apportioning congressional seats according to a “counting the whole number of persons in each State.” That language clearly and deliberately uses “persons” instead of “citizens.”

“The bill attempts to exclude non citizens from being counted when drawing congressional districts, which clearly violates the 14th Amendment,” House Oversight ranking member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said Tuesday. “This [citizenship] question will destroy the accuracy of the census and devastate numerous communities across the country. Non-citizens will avoid answering the census, leading to undercounts across the country.”

Republican backers argued that counting the roughly 21 million non-citizens undermines the voting power of citizens.

“Non-citizens are not evenly distributed among the states and some states end up with greater representation in Congress based on a higher concentration of non-citizens,” said House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) “This dilutes the ‘one-person, one-vote’ principle for citizens in states with fewer non-citizens.”

The committee voted 20-19 down party lines to advance the bill. 

Tuesday’s legislation is just the latest in MAGA Republicans’ multipronged campaign to remove non-citizens from the census. In his first administration, President Donald Trump attempted to exclude undocumented immigrants from the 2020 Census. Opponents immediately sued and the case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which blocked the proposed change on procedural grounds while ducking the underlying question of its legality. The Supreme Court also blocked the Trump Administration’s separate attempt to add a question on citizenship status to the Census. 

Trump’s unilateral attempts were ultimately doomed because the Constitution empowers Congress — not the president — with the “actual enumeration” of apportionment. But even if Congress enacted a law excluding non-citizens from the census, the Apportionment Clause of the Constitution would still present a considerable barrier.

On Tuesday, Democrats accused their Republican colleagues of trying to game the electoral system. “We’re here to fight for every single person who lives in our country, to make sure they have fair representation, and to make sure that we are funding our states adequately,” said Rep. Emily Randall (D-Wash.). “We are not here to try and rig elections so that more Republicans win.” 

Setting aside the legal and constitutional issues, excluding unlawful immigrants from the Census count on apportionment would likely shift congressional seats to GOP-dominated states, although by how much isn’t clear. The Pew Research Center estimated in 2020 that doing so would have netted Alabama, Ohio, and Minnesota each an additional House seat while California, Texas, and Florida would have each lost one seat. At a recent House Judiciary Committee hearing, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) estimated that removing noncitizens from the census count would shift 12 congressional seats to predominantly Republican states. 

The GOP’s preoccupation with a citizens-only census comes amid Trump’s wider efforts to stem a crushing defeat in the 2026 midterms as his polling figures continue to plummet to record lows through every administrative ploy available, no matter how dubious. He’s repeatedly called for holding an additional, mid-decade census excluding non-citizens, even though federal law prohibits such a count from being used in apportionment. Over the summer, Trump launched a mid-decade redistricting war, saying Republicans were “entitled” to five extra seats in Texas, which has now spread across the nation. 

Republicans have introduced a handful of bills aimed at limiting the Census to just citizens. The House passed a similar bill last year that then stalled in the Senate. 

Shortly before Trump took office this year, a handful of Republican-led states sued the Commerce Department for including noncitizens in the Census. That case has been paused since the new administration began. 

The longstanding suffrage slogan of “one person, one vote” was first articulated into constitutional law by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1963, which held that, along with the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection clause, the “conception of political equality from the Declaration of Independence, to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, to the Fifteenth, Seventeenth, and Nineteenth Amendments can mean only one thing — one person, one vote.” 

That principle against vote dilution became a critical tenet of Voting Rights Act jurisprudence. That longstanding landmark of civil rights law now faces an all-out assault from Republicans that has culminated in a pending Supreme Court case that observers fear will eviscerate courts’ ability to block vote-diluting electoral maps.