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GOP Rep. Mo Brooks has joined the state of Alabama in a lawsuit challenging the Commerce Department practice of counting everyone (not just citizens) for reapportionment.
15 states join legal fight to keep House districts based on total population
A federal judge is allowing a coalition of 15 states and the District of Columbia to be defendants in a lawsuit seeking to exclude noncitizens from being counted in the run-up to the re-allocation of congressional seats.
Last year the state of Alabama and one of its Republican congressmen, Mo Brooks, sued the Trump administration, arguing that the counting of undocumented immigrants in census figures used for determining reapportionment unfairly benefits states with higher numbers of noncitizens.
Alabama contends that counting the whole population — the practice used for apportionment since Congess began — rather than just citizens will cost the state one of its seven House seats (and therefore one of its electoral votes) following the 2020 census tally.
Alabama's suit is a long shot: Not only does the Constitution specify that a census include "the whole number of persons in each state" regardless of citizenship status, but also the Supreme Court ruled in 2016 against two Texas residents who challenged the practice of using the whole population to draw the state's legislative districts.
But the decision permitting other states to come to the defense of the Commerce Department and its Census Bureau, made last week by U.S. District Judge David Proctor of Birmingham, nonetheless raises the profile of a case that has been plodding along in the shadows of the Trump administration's now-abandoned efforts to add a citizenship question to next year's national population count.
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Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who tops the second tier of presidential candidates, is spending more time on democracy reform issues than her opponents for the Democratic nomination.
Klobuchar heads to Georgia to do what rivals haven’t: lean in to a democracy reform agenda
A top issue on the democracy reform agenda — protecting elections against both disinformation and cyber hacking — is getting some unusual attention this week in the Democratic presidential campaign.
Amy Klobuchar, arguably at the top of the second tier of candidates given her rising support in Iowa, went to Atlanta on Monday to highlight her efforts in the Senate to enhance election security and to unveil some additional proposals.
The choice of location made sense for two reasons. She and nine other Democrats will meet in the city Wednesday night for their latest in a series of debates where the governing system's problems have so far received short shrift. And Georgia has emerged as the most prominent state where bolstering voting rights and election integrity have become a top priority of the Democratic establishment.
Naturalized citizens living in Mississippi must prove their citizenship when they register to vote, unlike those born in the United States. Above, members of the military are sworn in as U.S. citizens at Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi.
Mississippi voting rules are biased against naturalized citizens, lawsuit alleges
The latest effort to ease restrictions on voting through litigation is a challenge to Mississippi's requirement that naturalized citizens show proof of their citizenship when they register.
The lawsuit, filed Monday by the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, says the law is unconstitutional because it violates of the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause by treating one category of citizens differently from another. People born in the United States need only check a box on the state's registration form attesting they are citizens.
The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which helped bring the suit, says Mississippi is the only state with a unique mandate for would-be voters who were not born American citizens.