Plot to Shake Up Census on Track for Supreme Court Redux

However, a three-judge panel with the Southern District of New York found called his changes “an unlawful exercise of the authority granted to the president.”

Some 30 briefs from friends of the court have been filed in the case by entities like the U.S. House of Representatives and a group of former Census Bureau directors.

Pillsbury Litigation partner Blaine Green, who filed an amicus brief for the League of Women Voters of the United States, told Courthouse News that the stakes in this case are high.

“The Constitution expressly requires that ‘representatives be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state,’” Green said. “By contravening the Constitution’s clear apportionment mandate, the memorandum — if implemented — would erode trust in our Constitutional system, democracy and the rule of law.”

Green emphasized that the case is about representative democracy and political power. “If immigrants are excluded [from the apportionment base], then those states with the largest populations of undocumented immigrants are likely to lose seats in the House of Representatives,” he said. “This would undermine the representative nature of our democracy, shifting representation and power away from states with more immigrants.”

States with the greatest immigrant populations, California and Texas, would be most likely to lose one or more seats in the House of Representatives, and Green said New York, Florida and New Jersey could also see losses.

But the ramifications would be felt by residents throughout these states as the number of seats a geographic area holds in Congress would correspond to a change in federal funding.

“When a state is underrepresented in Congress, all its constituents — regardless of immigration status — suffer from having to ‘share’ their representative and federal resource allocation with more of their neighbors than do residents of other states,” Green said.

In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, he added, federal funding for locally administered programs is especially important.

“At least 300 programs created by Congress rely on census-specific data to apportion approximately $800 billion annually to state and local governments,” he added. “This includes federally funded health, housing, and education programs that are critical to supporting the needs of local communities.”

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