In his “This Week with Gosar” newsletter Monday, U.S. Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ-09) said that during a House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing, every Democrat voted against H.R. 7109, the Equal Representation Act, which would add a citizenship question to the decennial census. An amended version of the legislation passed the committee vote (22-20) and awaits further action on the House floor.
Gosar, who serves on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, stated that the new question on the decennial census would ask, “Are you a citizen? YES or NO.”
He said of the vote results, “Not surprisingly, every Democrat on the committee voted against this commonsense legislation.”
The Arizona representative also expressed his concern about counting illegal aliens in the census. “Currently, the decennial census counts illegal aliens for purposes of reapportionment and allocating congressional seats,” he explained, “[t]hus, states that harbor illegal aliens will have their population numbers increased.”
“With a population increase, those states may well get additional congressional seats in the House of Representatives and other states will lose seats. The surge of illegal aliens will generally benefit blue states and cause Congress to have an artificially high number of Democrat congressional districts,” he added.
In addition, Gosar questioned the rationale behind the Democrats’ willingness to ignore the illegal immigration problem.
“Illegal immigration is a crime. Why are we awarding those who break our laws with Congressional representation? Because Democrats would rather have a wide-open southern border than a safe America. This is being done intentionally. It’s all about power,” he said.
H.R. 7109, introduced by North Carolina U.S. Representative Chuck Edwards (R-NC-11) in late January, would “…require a citizenship question on the decennial census” and change the “apportionment of Representatives to be based on United States citizens instead of all persons.”
Maryland U.S. Representative and Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-MD-8) opposed the measure during Wednesday’s committee hearing, citing Section 2 of the 14th Amendment, stating “that the apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives” was based on counting “‘the whole number of persons in each state,’ persons being the all-encompassing category, larger than that of voters or citizens.”
In contrast, U.S. Representative Andy Biggs (R-AZ-5) asked the committee, “So, is every tourist that happens to be in your state, is every college student that happens to be in your state, do they go to the census so they can be apportioned?”
Biggs suggested that some members “need to actually take a look at Section 5 of the 14th Amendment as well, which talks about Congress’s duty to enforce by appropriate legislation.”
The representative continued, “I would suggest that this bill is appropriate legislation trying to help us get a better grasp on the census.”
He stressed the bill’s importance, especially in states like Arizona, and called it “a meaningful, thoughtful way to regulate the counting of persons in your respective states, which is essential because the very purpose of the census was reapportionment every ten years.”
The U.S. Census Bureau is already preparing for the 2030 Census, which “will count residents of the United States and five U.S. territories and will mark the 25th population count in the United States.”
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Debra McClure is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Debra on X / Twitter.
Photo “Paul Gosar” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.
