Sen. Lisa Murkowski has found her inner-Justice Anton Scalia, and suddenly is a strict constitutionalist.
Last week, during votes on an amendment to require the U.S. Census to only consider actual citizens of the United States when determining population shifts that lead to changing political boundaries, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski was the only Republican to vote “nay.”
The question is whether the U.S. Census should ask the question: Are you a citizen? It matters, since over 7 million illegals have entered the country in just three years of the Biden Administration. Illegals in just those three years equal more than the population of 36 states.
As of June 2023, approximately 16.8 million illegal aliens live in the United States. “This is significantly higher than our January 2022 illegal alien population estimate of 15.5 million,” according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform. That’s over 5 of every 100 people living in America, and they are concentrated in places where it could lead to greater congressional representation.
Counting those individuals and assigning congressional boundaries based on them helps Democrats. All other Republicans appeared to understand it that way, but Sen. Murkowski does not apparently see this as a problem for Congress to solve. She’s going by the strict meaning of the word “persons.” Criminals who come across the border and murder joggers like Laken Riley? They are persons to be counted in order to redraw political boundaries.
The apportionment of seats in Congress is detailed in the U.S. Constitution, which says the census is used to divide the House of Representatives “among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State,” except for slaves, who were counted as three-fifths of a person until the late 1800s.
The amendment she voted against was Tennessee Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty’s motion to concur with a House amendment that said the census should determine the number of citizens as those who are actually citizens, not just illegals who illegally punched through the porous border.
Hagerty said, “I think most Americans are shocked to find out that today illegal migrants are used in the calculation of the number of people in a given state to allocate congressional districts and electoral college votes to that state. Lara [Trump] is exactly right; Democrats are basically harvesting electoral power on the backs of these illegal migrants. It shouldn’t be happening, and when I put a simple vote forward that only citizens can be counted for the purposes of allocating congressional districts and electoral votes, the Democrats just went nuts.” Hagerty made the statement on Fox News’ “Mornings With Maria” show.
“[Senator] Chuck Schumer threatened to shut the government down; we ground it down to the very last hour. Finally—I think they had an important event that they needed to attend—they agreed to put it to the floor for a vote. And as you said, every single Democrat voted to not allow just citizens alone to be counted, but to also include the counting of illegal migrants,” he said.
“Now, think about where people are fleeing in this nation. Citizens are leaving New York. They’re leaving Illinois. They’re leaving California, where the sanctuary city [is] located. New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, they’re actually creating these magnets so they can backfill and create more ‘bodies’ to count so that they can get more electoral votes,” he said.
“And we got one of the U.S. [Congresswomen] from Brooklyn, Yvette Clark, said the quiet part out loud just the other day. She said, ‘I need these illegal migrants for purposes of redistricting.’ And you know what’s so rich, Maria? Her district, the same one that Chuck Schumer used to have when he served in the Congress, her district, the school, to go home and study [on] Zoom because they needed that schoolhouse to house illegal migrants. That’s what’s happening here in America; that’s the motive behind the crime at our border.”
Sens. Bill Cassidy, of Louisiana and Hagerty, along with other Republican colleagues had earlier introduced a stand-alone bill called the Equal Representation Act, to ensure that only legal citizens are factored into the count for congressional districts and the electoral college map that determines presidential elections.
“The current method of counting illegal immigrants for purposes of representation serves as a perverse incentive for open borders to boost the relative political power of the states and voters that court it,” his office said. “It is unconscionable that illegal immigrants and non-citizens are counted toward congressional district apportionment and our electoral map. While people continue to flee Democrat-run cities, desperate Democrats are back-filling the mass exodus with illegal immigrants so that they do not lose their seats in Congress or their electoral votes for the presidency, hence artificially boosting their political power and in turn diluting the power of other Americans’ votes. I’m pleased to introduce this legislation that would require a citizenship question on the census and will ensure that only citizens are counted in congressional redistricting.”
