An Unconstitutional Census: Inside the Administration’s Incompetent and Historically Tainted Power Grab

In a move that constitutes a direct and unambiguous assault on the U.S. Constitution, President Felonious Punk announced on Thursday that he has instructed his administration to begin immediate work on a new, mid-decade census. The explicit goals of this unprecedented order are twofold: first, to exclude millions of undocumented immigrants from the nation’s official population count, and second, to use this new, manipulated tally to force a redrawing of congressional maps in favor of the Republican Party before the 2026 midterm elections. This is not a good-faith effort to get “accurate” data; it is a transparent and illegal power grab, a revival of a previously failed strategy, and a chilling echo of the most shameful compromises of the nation’s founding.

Part I: A Violation of Law and Precedent

The President’s order is a flagrant violation of the plain text of the Constitution. Article I, Section 2 explicitly empowers Congress, not the president, to carry out the “actual enumeration” of the country’s population and mandates that it occur in a regular, ten-year cycle. The 14th Amendment is even more explicit, requiring that the “whole number of persons in each state” be counted for the purposes of apportionment. Federal law, specifically Title 13 of the U.S. Code, codifies this, directing the Commerce Secretary to follow a once-a-decade schedule. That same law does allow for a mid-decade census, but it expressly forbids its results from being used for reapportionment—the President’s entire stated goal.

The founders’ choice to count all persons was not an accident or an oversight. In a new nation where nearly every non-enslaved person was an immigrant or the child of one, the idea of excluding residents based on their origin or legal status would have been absurd. The memory of being a nation of immigrants was not a distant, politicized abstraction; it was the lived reality. The President’s order is a direct betrayal of that foundational context.

This is not the first time this administration has attempted such a ploy. During his first term, the President tried to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census and later issued a memorandum to exclude undocumented immigrants from the count. The efforts were deemed unlawful by multiple federal courts, and the Supreme Court itself described the administration’s stated justification for the citizenship question as “contrived.” This is not a new strategy; it is the dogged revival of a previously defeated, unconstitutional, and judicially discredited tactic.

Part II: A Revival of America’s Original Sin

The plan to deliberately exclude millions of people from the nation’s count does more than just violate legal precedent; it “hearkens back to a very unsavory part of our history,” as Kareem Crayton of the Brennan Center for Justice noted. It is a direct, spiritual successor to the infamous Three-Fifths Compromise, the original sin of the Constitution, wherein enslaved Black people were counted as less than human for the explicit purpose of inflating the political power of the slave states. It is an echo of the centuries-long policy of not counting Native Americans at all.

This is not hyperbole; it is a direct parallel. The goal then, as now, was to devalue and erase non-white bodies from the official ledger of the nation in order to rig the distribution of political power. By seeking to exclude millions of predominantly non-white residents from the count, the administration is reviving the foundational logic of systemic, constitutional racism. It is an attempt to codify the idea that some “persons” in the United States count for less than others.

Part III: The Incompetent Power Grab

This illegal and immoral project is the centerpiece of a much broader, coordinated Republican pressure campaign. In Congress, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has already introduced the “Making American Elections Great Again Act,” a bill that mirrors the President’s order. On the ground, Vice President JD Fuxacouch is personally traveling to states like Indiana to pressure Republican governors to redraw their congressional maps. And in Texas, a Republican senator has even enlisted the FBI to help track down Democratic lawmakers who fled the state to block a similar gerrymandering effort.

But this frantic power grab contains a stunning flaw, a testament to an ideology so blinded by its own rhetoric that it fails to see the most basic facts. According to a 2020 Pew Research Center study, excluding undocumented immigrants from the census count would cause three states to lose a congressional seat: California, Texas, and Florida. The President’s plan is so poorly conceived that it would directly harm two of the largest and most important Republican states in the country. This is not just a malicious plan; it is a strategically incompetent one.

A War on Reality Itself

Ultimately, the President’s order for a new census must be seen in its proper context. It is the latest and most audacious battle in his administration’s broader war on objective data and reality itself. As Meeta Anand of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights noted, this move, coming just days after the firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, is “all part and parcel of the same playbook of telling people not to believe what is existing already… and instead to believe what is being put in front of them without evidence for the purposes of political gain.”

As John Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, summarized, “He wants to create an alternative reality where the people he wants to count count and the people he doesn’t do not.” It is a fundamental assault not just on the census, but on the very idea of a government based on knowable facts. It is an attempt to replace the “actual enumeration” mandated by the Constitution with a political fantasy, one that is not only illegal and immoral, but is built to fail even on its own cynical terms.