Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Biden rescinds Trump order excluding the undocumented from reapportionment numbers

Joe Biden signs executive orders

President Biden signs executive orders just hours after taking the oath of office Wednesday.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

During his first day in office, President Biden signed a flurry of executive orders countermanding the actions of his predecessor. That initial batch of 17 orders included a reversal of Donald Trump's unprecedented effort to exclude undocumented immigrants when tabulating the U.S. population for the purpose of reallocating congressional districts.

Citing the 14th Amendment, Biden restored the centuries-old practice of counting every person residing in the United States when determining how many seats each state gets in the House of Representatives.

"We have long guaranteed all of the Nation's inhabitants representation in the House of Representatives," the order reads. "This tradition is foundational to our representative democracy, for our elected representatives have a responsibility to represent the interests of all people residing in the United States and affected by our laws. This tradition also respects the dignity and humanity of every person."


While advocates for the traditional, inclusive count celebrated Biden's executive order, it is more important as a symbol for the new administration's priorities than as an actual directive. Steven Dillingham, the Census Bureau director under Trump, resigned Wednesday — nearly a year ahead of schedule — after coming under heavy criticism for politicizing the decennial count, and the agency had already abandoned plans to eliminate illegal immigrants from the enumeration.

According to data assembled by the Center for Immigration Studies, three states — California, New York and Texas — would each lose a seat in the House of Representatives if illegal immigrants were excluded from the numbers used for reapportionment. Those seats would go to Alabama, Minnesota and Ohio — probably leading to small net gain of congressional seats for Republicans.

If U.S.-born children of that cohort were included, California and Texas would each lose two seats and New York would still drop one. The two additional districts would go to Michigan and West Virginia.

Trump's July 2019 order had directed federal agencies to share citizenship data with the Census Bureau and was based on research by a Republican strategist who determined that adding a citizenship question to the census would help the GOP's gerrymandering efforts.

In addition to allocating congressional seats, the numbers are used to determine how federal dollars are appropriated among the states.

Read More

Poll: 82% of Americans Want Redistricting Done by Independent Commission, Not Politicians

Capitol building, Washington, DC

Unsplash/Getty Images

Poll: 82% of Americans Want Redistricting Done by Independent Commission, Not Politicians

There may be no greater indication that voters are not being listened to in the escalating redistricting war between the Republican and Democratic Parties than a new poll from NBC News that shows 8-in-10 Americans want the parties to stop.

It’s what they call an "80-20 issue," and yet neither party is standing up for the 80% as they prioritize control of Congress.

Keep ReadingShow less
Nationalization by Stealth: Trump’s New Industrial Playbook

The White House and money

AI generated image

Nationalization by Stealth: Trump’s New Industrial Playbook

In the United States, where the free market has long been exalted as the supreme engine of prosperity, a peculiar irony is taking shape. On August 22, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced that the federal government had acquired a stake of just under 10% in Intel, instantly making itself the company’s largest shareholder. The stake - roughly 433 million shares, valued at about $8.9 billion, purchased at $20.47 each - was carved out of the Biden-era CHIPS Act subsidies and repackaged as equity. Formally, it is a passive, non-voting stake, with no board seat or governance rights. Yet symbolism matters: Washington now sits, however discreetly, in Intel’s shareholder register. Soon afterward, reports emerged that Samsung, South Korea’s industrial giant, had also been considered for similar treatment. What once would have been denounced as creeping socialism in Washington is now unfolding under Donald Trump, a president who boasts of his devotion to private enterprise but increasingly embraces tactics that blur the line between capitalism and state control.

The word “nationalization,” for decades associated with postwar Britain, Latin American populists, or Arab strongmen, is suddenly back in circulation - but this time applied to the citadel of capitalism itself. Trump justifies the intervention as a matter of national security and economic patriotism. Subsidies, he argues, are wasteful. Tariffs, in his view, are a stronger tool for forcing corporations to relocate factories to U.S. soil. Yet the CHIPS Act, that bipartisan legacy of the Biden years, remains in force and politically untouchable, funneling billions of dollars into domestic semiconductor projects. Rather than scrap it, Trump has chosen to alter the terms: companies that benefit from taxpayer largesse must now cede equity to the state. Intel, heavily reliant on those funds, has become the test case for this new model of American industrial policy.

Keep ReadingShow less