Why no reapportionment in 1920

Perhaps, but the Census Bureau offers what the Internet does not. But when these arguments are stacked up against the promise of a fit-for-purpose census at a fraction of the cost and at a speed not possible by a clunky government agency, what was unprecedented suddenly becomes plausible. Of course privatizing and profiting from the census goes deeper than controlling costs. It reaches to basic democratic principles. If the Congress could ignore the Constitution, might the current Congress equally overlook constitutional language that assigns to the census the fundamental task of ensuring political representation proportionate to population size?

Social Science Research Council. The SSRC is an independent, international, nonprofit organization. It fosters innovative research, nurtures new generations of social scientists, deepens how inquiry is practiced within and across disciplines, and mobilizes necessary knowledge on important public issues.

Support the SSRC. Items is a space for engagement with insights from the work of the Council and the social sciences. The Immanent Frame publishes interdisciplinary perspectives on religion, secularism, and the public sphere. Recently released internal government documents show that hostility to undocumented immigrants played a role in the last-minute decision to include a citizenship question in the Census.

The President himself has indicated his preference for immigrants from Nordic countries. Meanwhile, the state of Alabama is suing the federal government to exclude immigrants when apportioning seats. Alabama claims states with large immigrant populations will benefit unfairly in reapportionment because representation should only reflect the citizen population. Could Congress again refuse to reapportion following the Census? The current stalemate among far-right House Republicans who want much greater limits on all immigration and the Republican moderates who do not; an unpredictable President ; and a generally more moderate Senate suggests that current immigration issues may still be unresolved after the Census.

Anderson, Margo J.. Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. This article was written by GovTrack staff member Amy West. Like our analyses? Want more? Support our work! Congress U. Presidency U. All Rights Reserved. The Census and Reapportionment. Report Outline History of the Decennial Census The Census Dats and Reafportionment Reapportionment Issues Now Before Congress The Jones-Vandetiberg bill now pending in the Senate makes provision for the fifteenth decennial census and for a reapportionment, on the basis of returns from that census, of congressional representation among the states.

Reapportionment, Redistricting, and Representation. Redistricting Showdown. Yet despite these likely undercounts, the census accurately showed that for the first time in its history, the United States had a majority urban population.

In redrawing district lines on the basis of the census count, the Northern industrial states were about to take congressional seats from the more rural Southern states. Southern states and rural districts were not only threatened numerically by a census that showed an increasingly urbanized population. The census might also contain proof that black voters were being suppressed, something that could diminish congressional power of states engaging in voter suppression.

Leaders of the NAACP made the proposal that the representation of the Southern states that had disenfranchised their black citizens should be diminished accordingly. They supported enforcing a little-known clause of the 14th Amendment that created a mechanism to punish states that prevented some male citizens i. African American men from going to the polls. It provided that the census be used to compare the counted adult population and the effective voting population of a state to monitor voter suppression.

If the number of adults in Southern states as counted by the census were compared against the number of voters, Congress would see that the votes of black citizens were being suppressed, the NAACP argued, and as a result, the South should lose congressional seats under this provision of the 14th Amendment.

Conservative Southern Democrats adamantly opposed any such move, of course. They fired back with their own argument about how the census should be used, by asking that non-naturalized immigrants be taken out of the population used to apportion representatives between the states, which would have hurt Northeastern and Midwestern states but not the South, where the foreign-born population was small.

William Larsen of Georgia, a Democrat, led the attack against Walter White, George Murray and William Pickens of the NAACP, repeatedly using racial slurs during their testimonies, dismissing their numerous documented examples of voter suppression and invoking past practices of voter fraud on the part of black voters to whom he gave invented names. Larsen argued that voting was a matter of state law and tried to block any attempt to investigate voter participation in the South, saying that voting laws had nothing to do with apportionment.