Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to provide that Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the number of persons in each State who are citizens of the United States.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

The last President tried to include a citizenship question on the decennial Census in 2020 and tried to count only U.S. citizens for the purpose of Census and reapportionment, and the effort failed miserably in court, for obvious reasons.

Section 2 of the 14th Amendment states that apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives is based on ``the whole number of persons in each State,'' persons being the all-encompassing category, much larger than that of citizens.

When the Framers wanted to impose a citizenship requirement in the text of the Constitution, they knew how to do it. Take the President of the United States, for example. It says that you have got to be a born U.S. citizen in order to run for President. Some of the historians tell us that was because Thomas Jefferson was trying to block Alexander Hamilton from running for President. He was foreign born. In any event, however, it was very clear that you needed to be a born U.S. citizen to run for President. For those of us in the House, it says we must have been a citizen for at least 7 years.

There are lots of citizenship requirements in the Constitution. There is no citizenship requirement for being counted in the Census and for purposes of reapportionment. On the contrary, the Census and reapportionment have included all persons, including noncitizens, like permanent resident green card holders, since 1790. That has been the unbroken practice since the beginning of the Republic.

This point was made even more clearly and emphatically by the Supreme Court in its unanimous 2016 decision in Evenwel v. Abbott, rejecting precisely the argument my distinguished friend is trying to make. Like this legislation itself, Evenwel involved a challenge to congressional apportionment based on a total count of the entire population

instead of a limited count of the total citizen or voter population. Justice Ginsburg held for a unanimous court that section 3 of the 14th Amendment ``retained total population as the congressional apportionment base.'' She cited the speech made on the floor of the Senate by Senator Jacob Howard upon introduction of section 2 of the 14th Amendment:

``The basis of representation is numbers . . . . The committee adopted numbers as the most just and satisfactory basis, and this is the principle upon which the Constitution itself was originally framed, that the basis of representation should depend upon numbers; and such, I think, after all, is the safest and most secure principle upon which the government can rest. Numbers, not voters; numbers, not property; this is the theory of the Constitution.''

My colleague needs to remember that when the Republic was founded, the vast majority of people were not citizens who could vote. Women could not vote, children could not vote, enslaved Americans, obviously, could not vote. So the Census and apportionment was for everybody who was here. That was the whole basis of the three-fifths compromise. Because enslaved Americans were being counted, too, what percentage should they count for purposes of reapportionment? Well, Congress arrived at 60 percent, three-fifths. It was the Southern States who were saying they should count completely for these purposes because they wanted the enslaved Americans to be enlarging and inflating the congressional delegations from the slave states. For these purposes, the Northern States said: No, they shouldn't count at all; they should count zero percent in the apportionment. They arrived at three-fifths. In any event, everybody agreed that everybody would be counted.

Justice Ginsburg included lots of decisive legislative authority like this, including the floor statement here in the House of Representative James Blaine, who stated: ``No one will deny that population is the true basis of representation; for women, children, and other nonvoting classes may have as vital an interest in the legislation of the country as those who actually deposit the ballot.''

For all of you constitutional textualists out there, the plain reading of the text is clear as day.

For all of you constitutional originalists out there, the original purposes of the passage of the 14th Amendment have been carefully articulated by the Supreme Court on a unanimous basis and never rebutted.

For all of you Members who like to follow precedent, every apportionment since 1790 has included every single person residing in the United States, not just those lucky enough to have been given the right to vote. As the Evenwel Court noted, the 14th Amendment contemplates that ``Representatives serve all residents, not just those eligible or registered to vote.''

The constitutional meaning is indisputable, a point which settles this for those who actually want to follow the Constitution in all cases, not just when it favors our own preferred policy outcome.

The House should be getting real work done instead of wasting more time on another MAGA bill that will never pass the Senate, let alone get signed by the President, much less approved by the courts. The bill is an insult, and it is an affront to the great radical Republicans who wrote the 14th Amendment. Their party was a profreedom, pro-union, proimmigrant, anticonspiracy theory, anti-Know Nothing Party that wanted to make sure everybody in the country was counted and made visible.

The Census is essential to democracy. Just as the Framers endorsed Thomas Paine's ``Common Sense,'' they endorsed a common Census, but this bill would destroy the accuracy of the Census, which may have something to do with its actual legislative motivation.

In the 2010 Census, the undercount of Hispanic citizens was 1.4 percent. In 2020, that number grew to 5 percent, with many observers crediting that jump to the Trump administration's simple attempt to add a citizenship question to the Census and all of the intense publicity and rumor surrounding it.

The addition of a question about citizenship will indeed deter many immigrants, including people who are permanent residents, including citizens, from completing the Census. Many noncitizen immigrants who are seeking asylum or are refugees will avoid responding because of uncertainty over their status and fear of arbitrary law enforcement action.

Extensive research over the last decade shows that many residents wrongly believe the Census Bureau will share their responses with other agencies. To be clear on this point, it does not. Federal law prohibits it. However, that pervasive worry has prevented some people from answering questions about immigration status or responding to the Census at all.

Mr. Speaker, we strongly oppose this legislation as unconstitutional and unwise. It dishonors our own history and the values of the Nation.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

The gentleman from North Carolina observes that we don't have anybody wearing a black robe in the House of Representatives today, but you don't have to wear a black robe in order to read the Constitution, interpret the Constitution, and follow it.

If you need people with black robes, then I would urge the gentleman to read the Supreme Court's decision in Evenwel v. Abbott, where the Supreme Court unanimously found that the Census and reapportionment must include the entire population, all persons; not all citizens, not all voters, the alternative suggestions that are being made today.

Mr. Speaker, what do we have here? Since 1790, all persons have been included in the Census, in every Census on a decennial basis since the beginning of the Republic.

The Supreme Court rejected the theory that is being advanced by my friends in the majority today in Evenwel v. Abbott that the Constitution requires citizens rather than persons, and the gentleman from North Carolina invites us to think it has something to do with immigration.

We actually had an immigration deal coming out of the Senate for hundreds of new Border Patrol officers and asylum officers and asylum judges and fentanyl detection machinery, and it was vetoed by the fourth branch of government, Donald Trump, who said he didn't want a border solution, he wanted a border crisis to run on.

Despite the fact that Senator Lankford, perhaps one of the most conservative Senators that we have in the Republican Party, said that this was a great deal and the best that he had ever seen coming out of the Senate, and despite the fact that Senator McConnell was for it, they blew it all up.

You judge for yourself the seriousness of the claims that they want to do something about immigration. This is another useless and needless distraction.

I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from California (Ms. Barragan).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from Illinois (Mrs. Ramirez).

Mr. Speaker, I am about to yield to my friend from New York (Ms. Meng), but I am inspired by the remarks of the gentleman from Wisconsin, especially about the word ``Republic'' which, of course, comes from res publica, the public thing.

He happened upon a subject that is of a lot of interest to me because I wrote a paper about it when I was in sixth grade.

The Pledge of Allegiance was written by a radical Baptist minister named Francis Bellamy--I am not sure if the gentleman is aware of that--on the 400th anniversary of Columbus' arrival in the new world.

Reverend Bellamy, who was an abolitionist in Vermont, was concerned about the continuing salute of the Confederate battle flag in the southern States.

He wanted to write a flag salute that would be unifying for the union, and he wrote: I pledge allegiance to my flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation, with liberty and justice for all.

You notice what is not in there. He did not have ``under God.'' That was added in 1954 by Congress several weeks after the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

In any event, I am not quite sure what the relevance is of the gentleman's invocation of the Republic or of Ben Franklin and the famous vignette about him saying: If you can keep it.

Ben Franklin was, of course, a big supporter of immigration to the country, although he did display an anti-German bias in some of his writings.

I will tell you a little story about Ben Franklin that might be of relevance to what the gentleman is talking about because I just did a tour in Philadelphia with the Ben Franklin people up there, and we learned this wonderful story.

He made a loan to a friend of his for $100, and then he recorded in his diary that this gentleman he made the loan to for $100, Josiah, was always disappearing behind a tree or a building whenever Ben came along.

He finally caught up with him, and he said: Josiah, I loaned you a hundred bucks, and I am wondering, am I going to be able to get my principal back or at least the interest?

Josiah said: Well, Ben, look. The $100 is well invested somewhere else, so you don't have to worry about that.

Franklin said: Well, what about the interest?

Josiah said: Well, I forgot to tell you that it is against my religion to pay interest, so I can't pay you the interest.

Franklin said: You mean to tell me it is against your principle to pay me the interest, and it is against your interest to pay me the principal?

Josiah said: That's right.

Franklin said: Well, I can see I am not going to get either.

Well, here our principles and our interests converge very much. The principles are set forth in the Constitution, which is we count everybody, and everybody is part of the Census, and everybody is part of the reapportionment process.

It has been like that since 1790. We don't need to start finger painting on the Constitution with this silly election year proposal.

It is also in our interest because, as my colleagues have said, this is a land that is built on immigration. Except for the Native Americans who are already here and the people who were brought over as slaves, all of us are the descendants of immigrants to this country.

Tom Paine, when he got to America in 1774, 2 years before the Revolution, he said: This land, if it lives up to its principles, will become an asylum to humanity--not an insane asylum, mind you--an asylum to humanity, a place of refuge for people seeking freedom from religious, political, and economic oppression. That is who we are.

Every day I have in my office people from the hotel industry, people from the construction industry, and people from the restaurant industry saying: We have huge labor shortages. We need people in America.

I am for a whole lot more lawful immigration to America, less unlawful immigration to America like the deal that was worked out in the Senate that was rejected by the Republicans, and a lot less demagoguery about who we are as a country because the Census and reapportionment provisions in the 14th Amendment tell it all.

This is a country that is for everybody seeking opportunity and hope,

willing to follow the law and follow our Constitution.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Meng).

Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 30 seconds to the gentlewoman from New York.

Mr. Speaker, I know Mr. Burchett's prayers go right to the top.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

It is always great to be with my friend from Tennessee. Just two quick points on his always trenchant remarks.

One is that one should be clear that under this legislation, they are not roping out of the reapportionment just undocumented people. They are also roping out of the reapportionment permanent residents, people who are green card holders who are on the pathway to citizenship already. They are talking about disenfranchising from the Census reapportionment process millions of people who are lawfully within it. They should be aware of that.

Also, if we were being cynical politically, we would embrace this legislation because it is the red States like Texas and Florida whose congressional delegations are inflated by virtue of counting people who are not citizens. We are simply trying to follow what the Constitution says, which I know is kind of a radical proposition around here these days.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from North Carolina (Ms. Manning).

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to the time remaining.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

If you strip away all the bombast and all the rhetoric, the gentleman just basically delivered a tirade about immigration but never addressed the fact that their legislation is totally unconstitutional.

If you want to deal with immigration, we had a bill, and the bill would have added hundreds of Border Patrol officers, asylum officers, and judges. The Republican leadership in the Senate said it was a great deal. They got most of what they wanted. It was a great compromise. Yet, who didn't want it? Donald Trump, still the putative leader of those who are left in the GOP, Lincoln's party. Donald Trump didn't want it because he didn't want a border solution. He wants a border crisis.

They are left with a bunch of completely superficial, empty bills like this one, which I doubt will even pass the House. If it does pass the House, it certainly won't pass the Senate. It will never be signed by the President, and it would be struck down immediately by the Supreme Court.

Why are we wasting our time on that instead of getting to the legislation that actually a majority of the Senate was behind? I wish one of my colleagues would address that.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, it is always delightful to hear my friend from Colorado speak. One thing that I do want to point out, however, because there might be some students in the gallery today, is that there can be no illegal aliens and there can be no green card holders in Congress because the Constitution very clearly specifies that you must have been a citizen for 7 years before you run for the House, you must have been a citizen for 9 years before you run for the Senate, and you must be a born U.S. citizen in order to run for President of the United States, which some historians, as I think I mentioned before, attribute to Thomas Jefferson trying to write Alexander Hamilton out of the Presidential sweepstakes.

In any event, I think that my colleagues should probably relax with some of the hyperbole and exaggeration here. After all, all we are saying is: Let's keep doing what we have done since 1790 in the country.

This is the way that the Census and the reapportionment have always been run in the United States of America, and what they are proposing is obviously a radical departure from what the Constitution ordains.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to hear someone on that side of the aisle denounce Vladimir Putin, and I thank him for his remarks. We should definitely avoid putting in a President of the United States who looks up to Vladimir Putin and calls him a genius.

In any event, I could be persuaded by the gentleman's policy arguments, but then we have got to amend the Constitution. This is the way it has been done since the beginning of the Republic. The language in the 14th Amendment is perfectly clear, that it is all of the persons of the State who have to be counted.

Mr. Speaker, I thought you guys were constitutional textualists. I thought you followed the language of the Constitution, the original intent of the Constitution, and the precedent that has been set. I could be persuaded by it. I don't like the fact that Texas and Florida, or any State for that matter, gets an inflated congressional delegation because of this reason or that. Let's have that discussion, but you have got to amend the Constitution. You can't just say: Well, I don't like what is in the Constitution, and therefore I am going to ignore it.

The point about the territories I am not sure I understood. That undercut the gentleman's argument because, of course, the people in the territories are not represented in the House of Representatives except by nonvoting delegates whose votes ultimately don't count and can't count according to a D.C. circuit court decision called Michel v. Anderson.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, why do you need to amend the Constitution if you can just go ahead and do it by statute here?

That is rather curious. I think the gentleman doth protest just a little bit too much. I admire the intellectual honesty in putting forth a constitutional amendment, because that is precisely what needs to be done. I am happy to look at that. I appreciate his candor in admitting that the Constitution needs to be amended in order to overturn more than 2 centuries of practice and everything the Supreme Court has ever said about the issue.

It also should be clear to everybody that only U.S. citizens of majority may vote in Federal elections, that is Federal law, but everybody, including children, who are U.S. citizens are counted even though they can't vote in Federal elections.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time to close.

Mr. Speaker, I don't want to be in the position of lecturing my colleagues about something that they often like to say, but the Constitution is the Constitution, and nobody yet has laid a glove on the Constitution or explained how the Supreme Court erred in the unanimous Evenwel decision.

None of them has been able to explain away the very plain language of the 14th Amendment, that it is all the persons of the States who are counted, not the citizens, and that has been the basis for both the Census and the reapportionment since the country began.

So the rest of it just strikes me like election year political rhetoric. To the extent that we want to deal with immigration, we had a great bargain that came out of the Senate, which everybody in this body and that body seemed to be behind, until they heard from Donald Trump that no, he didn't want to see any legislative progress, he wanted to be able to demagogue the immigration issue out on the campaign trail, although he has been severely undermined by all of the exposure that went into that decision.

Again, I haven't heard anyone either explain why their legislation is constitutional, nor have I heard anybody explain what is wrong with the immigration package that we have for hundreds of new Border Patrol officers, hundreds of new Border Patrol and asylum judges and a crackdown of drugs at the border.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Resolution 1194, I call up the bill (H.R. 7109) to require a citizenship question on the decennial census, to require reporting on certain census statistics, and to modify apportionment of Representatives to be based on United States citizens instead of all persons, and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the measure under consideration.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, H.R. 7109 has three components.

Number one, it requires the Census Bureau to include a citizenship question on the decennial census questionnaire.

Number two, the bill directs that this information be used to ensure fair representation by requiring only citizens be included in the apportionment base.

Number three, it has a severability clause.

Currently, the Census Bureau estimates the noncitizen population using data collected annually in the American Community Survey. We are going to call that ACS as I go, just to help you out. That data is not necessarily accurate.

Further, there are no reports that asking a citizenship question on the ACS every year suppresses illegal, alien, or other noncitizen participation on the ACS questionnaire.

The constitutionally iterated rationale for a decennial census is to apportion electoral districts for Congress.

In Commerce v. New York, the Supreme Court noted that a host of various questions over the years that are tangential to apportionment had been included in the decennial censuses, ``race, sex, age, health, education, occupation, housing, and military service,'' and ``radio ownership, age at first marriage, and native tongue,'' et cetera.

The citizenship question is no stranger to the Census questionnaire. Commerce also noted: ``Every Census between 1820 and 2000 (with the exception of 1840) asked at least some of the population about their citizenship or place of birth. Between 1820 and 1950, the question was asked of all households. Between 1960 and 2000, it was asked of about one-fourth to one-sixth of the population.'' That is another quote from the Commerce case.

This isn't a uniquely American practice. Even the United Nations recommends collecting citizenship information via a census, as noted by, again, the Commerce Court. Australia, Canada, France, Indonesia, Ireland, Germany, Mexico, Spain, and the United Kingdom ask about citizenship in their respective censuses.

Is the United States to be the only North American country not to inquire about citizenship in its Census protocols?

The Commerce Court held, regarding the positing of a citizenship question on the Census, as follows: ``In light of the early understanding of and long practice under the Enumeration Clause, we conclude that it permits Congress, and by extension the Secretary [of Commerce], to inquire about citizenship on the Census questionnaire.''

Section 2 of H.R. 7109 simply asks whether a person is a citizen of the United States, yes or no. That is it, but everyone gets counted.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

As my friend knows, the Commerce case held specifically you can ask the citizenship question on the Census. That is true. You can do that. That is what we are proposing.

Additionally, he misstated the rationale on why the Commerce case went the way it did. They said you can ask the question, but that the Secretary had contrived his rationale and was in violation of the APA, and that is why that happened.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Edwards).

Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 15 seconds to the gentleman from North Carolina.

Mr. Speaker, of course, every single Democrat voted against the great border security bill, H.R. 2. That is how serious they are not. Every person is counted under this bill. Why can't we ask them what their citizenship is?

I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Higgins).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Grothman).

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to the time remaining.

Mr. Speaker, I wish we were hearing not deflective statements but the actual truth here.

Here is the way it works. There is nothing in this bill that says you don't count everybody. You do count everybody. The thing they really don't want us to know is how many illegal aliens are in the country, so we are going to ask a citizenship question, which has been asked in 22 of 25 Censuses. They don't want that.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Burchett).

Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 10 seconds to the gentleman from Tennessee.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Langworthy).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Colorado (Ms. Boebert).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Graves).

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire about the time remaining.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Davidson).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Jordan), who is the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

Mr. Speaker, I am prepared to close, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, it is an honor to debate here about this. Let me tell you something, Mr. Speaker, I believe that, by far, most Americans would agree with the proposition that those illegally in the United States and noncitizens should not be counted for purposes of creating or modifying congressional legislative districts. That is probably what they think, and that is exactly what section 3 of this bill leads to.

Foreign nationals here legally who have not naturalized and cannot vote in Federal elections, together with illegal aliens who cannot vote in Federal elections, comprise a substantial portion of our population, by some accounts in excess of 15 percent of our populations.

Noncitizens are not evenly distributed among the States, and some States end up with greater representation in Congress based on a higher concentration of noncitizens. Perhaps that is what one New York Congresswoman meant when, in response to a question regarding illegal aliens, she said: ``I need more people in my district just for redistricting purposes.''

The provision of this bill would ensure a fair apportionment based on equal representation of citizens.

Now, my colleague has relied on Evenwel v. Abbott, a case that they relied on wrongfully. Their reliance is totally misplaced.

First of all, they are dealing with State apportionment issues in Evenwel, not Federal, but State. Let's go ahead, and let's see what Justice Ginsburg did. She cited with approval the district court holding in Evenwel that the Supreme Court allows jurisdictions to use any neutral, nondiscriminatory baseline, including total population, when drawing State and local legislative districts.

That has never been overturned, nor did Justice Ginsburg overturn it in Evenwel. In Evenwel, the plaintiffs that came before the Court wanted apportionment based on the citizen voting age population. That is what they were asking for.

Although Evenwel deals with State and local apportionment, we can fairly extrapolate that rationale to Federal apportionment, as well. Justice Ginsburg's holding in Evenwel turns on the idea that voter equality in a district is not required. It is not required. However, she also lays out that neither is it the total population metric that is implied by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle. That is not required either.

For instance, Justice Ginsburg referred to Burns v. Richardson. In that case, it held that districts may be apportioned on the basis of registered voters or voter-eligible populations, that that is permissible.

In the Burns case, they give the example of Hawaii, which could rationally justify its use of voter-eligible apportionment because of the large number of transients and military personnel it had. The Burns court noted that apportioning using registered voters was permissible because of the conditions in which Hawaii found itself.

Now, what has happened since then? What has happened since then is this administration will admit that 9.2 million illegal aliens have come in under their control. They will also admit that there is another 1.8 million known got-aways. That is 11 million people that the administration will admit to have come in, in 3\1/2\ years. It has distorted the population. It skewed the one-person, one-vote standard, which is the canon upon which the commerce case was founded. It is the one-person, one-vote rule.

Our colleagues on the other side don't want to acknowledge that there is a constitutional basis, as I have just cited, to allow section 3 to go forward, but Democrats are perfectly content with California, which is a sanctuary State, hauling in people. The minority is perfectly content with New York bringing in people through sanctuary policies, or Illinois. That skews exactly what the Founders intended to make straight and clear.

Let's go to the 14th Amendment for just one second to actually read the second part of the 14th Amendment, or get to that. I am not going to read it. The first clause, that is what my colleague across the aisle, Mr. Speaker, has relied on exclusively, but he didn't bother to tell you about the second clause.

In the second clause itself, it deals with every Federal election and every State election for State Governor, judicial body, and State legislatures. What they do there in the second clause of the 14th Amendment is provide a way to reduce apportionment when those individuals may be disqualified.

Mr. Speaker, that is what we are saying here. That is why this bill needs to pass, and I urge a passage.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Biggs for leading this debate, and I thank Mr. Davidson for his co-leadership on this bill.

Mr. Speaker, I will tell you what is an insult. The current situation is an insult to the American people, the citizens who live here whose voice and vote are being degraded because of the horrendous immigration problem that we have at our southern border through illegal aliens coming across the border, and that not being addressed here in Washington, D.C.

One of the lesser acknowledged, but equally alarming, side effects of this administration's failure to secure the southern border is the illegal immigration population's influence in America's electoral process.

Our democracy depends on accurate representation and electoral integrity. Voting is a coveted privilege held by American citizens, and elected Representatives are responsible for serving the interests of the voters in their district.

Even if not a single illegal alien casts a vote, the mere presence of illegal immigrants in the United States is having a profound impact on the outcomes of elections, skewing the representation of Americans.

Mr. Biggs points out that the U.S. Constitution mandates that a Census be carried out every 10 years where everyone who is present in the United States, regardless of their citizenship and immigration status, is counted. The Constitution does not specify whether noncitizens or illegal aliens must be counted for the purpose of apportioning House seats.

You may recall that in 2016, President Trump through executive order added a citizenship question back to the 2020 Census, the same question that had been legally asked on nearly every Census since 1820 until it was removed in 1960, not because there was anything found wrong with that question, but because the effect of illegal immigration was negligible at that time. However, there is no doubt today, Mr. Speaker, the effect of illegal immigration is significant. I won't waste my time making that case here. We all know it. It is a top concern of about 70 percent of all Americans.

Though common sense dictates that only citizens should be counted for the apportionment process, illegal aliens have nonetheless recently been counted toward the final tallies that determine how many House seats that each State is allocated and the number of electoral votes that it will wield in Presidential elections.

Since the illegal alien population is not evenly distributed through the Nation, American citizens in some States are losing representation in Congress to illegal aliens in other States.

A 2019 study by the Center for Immigration Studies estimates illegal immigrants and noncitizens who have not naturalized and do not have the right to vote impact the distribution of 26

House seats. My bill, the Equal Representation Act, would finally address this alarming undermining of American democracy by requiring a citizenship question be added back to the 2030 Census, creating reporting requirements for data gathered from citizenship questions and requiring that only U.S. citizens be counted for the purpose of congressional apportionment.

Mr. Speaker, this bill will no doubt and has no doubt drawn criticism from those who don't want to fix this problem and who seek to gain political influence by not fixing it. They will claim to have become experts on our Constitution. I don't see any black robes in this Chamber today. They will point to the word ``persons'' in section 2 of the 14th Amendment as a reason why this bill should not pass, but this word carries no definition in our Constitution, and it offers multiple meanings in current law.

Allow me to argue, in 1992, in Franklin v. Massachusetts, a Supreme Court case on apportionment of Representatives opined the term ``persons'' to mean an individual who not only has a physical presence but some element of allegiance to a particular place.

The Census Bureau does not include foreigners who visit the United States for a vacation or a business trip in the population count since they have no political or legal allegiance to any State or the Federal Government.

Similarly, illegal aliens who are deportable have no allegiance or enduring tie to the United States. Foreigners here on visas have an allegiance politically and legally to their home countries, not to the United States, so the same logic applies to them.

My bill is a commonsense solution to a chronic problem impacting the very governance and democracy of this country.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for yielding.

Those are a lot of words from the opposition to this bill to say that citizenship does not matter. That is basically their argument: We don't care if you are a citizen.

In fact, they encourage you to not be a citizen. Sanctuary cities and States invite everyone from the world to flood their cities, and they need it. They have said as much in interviews that their population is fleeing their horrible policies in States like California, Illinois, Maryland, New York, and elsewhere, and they are going to places that have more freedom and less government.

So what do they do?

They import new people who don't know better, and, yes, the conditions are better there than the places they are fleeing, but as my colleague, Mr. Graves, was pointing out, California has six to seven Members. That is more than many of our States. Yes, Texas has Representatives because they, too, have a large illegal population, and the Biden administration is doing everything possible to prevent them from stopping this invasion of our country.

It is willfully and purposefully, and I will add skillfully, undermining the value of U.S. citizenship to flood this country with noncitizens.

I want to tell some great news to my colleagues: Foreign nationals do have representation in the United States at embassies or consulates. Their representative is not here in the United States Congress. I represent United States citizens, and so do my colleagues.

Nonetheless, noncitizens do not vote, and they should not vote, but don't let that stop them. They are working to change that too so that they can vote. We found that noncitizens are voting, and they found loopholes to do that with the Motor Voter Act.

We have to defend the value and right of U.S. citizens. The only way to do that is to do the very purpose of the Census, which is to apportion Representatives.

Now, we get a lot of other ancillary benefits from the Census, but the constitutional purpose of it is to know who is here.

Now, they want to know everything else about you, Mr. Speaker, how many hyphens you have in your ethnicity, national origin, what you believe about your religion, how much you make, and every other way they can invade your privacy, but they don't give a rip whether or not you are a United States citizen.

The American people deserve to be fairly and equally represented, and the only way that is going to be done is if we know who is a citizen, and the apportionment is based on United States citizens.

This amendment needs to be passed.

For assurance, for the previous three Congresses, I have introduced a constitutional amendment. In this Congress that is H.J. Res. 37. I assume Mr. Raskin will run down and cosponsor it immediately because he knows that he could amend the Constitution and defend the principle that is at stake here.

Mr. Speaker, I urge all of our colleagues to sponsor this bill and to vote ``yes'' on this bill and get it passed.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my cousin, Representative Raskin, for yielding me time.

We have wasted another legislative week on ludicrous messaging bills to defend the liberty of laundry and freedom for the fridge. Today, they are pushing a bill to upend our Nation's process for collecting Census data.

Let's be clear. The so-called Equal Representation Act does nothing to live up to its name. In fact, their bill would result in the opposite. It will reduce participation in the Census, which our government relies on for a host of data to inform our decisionmaking.

What is more, this bill will violate our Constitution, which states that all persons be counted in the Census. Instead of wasting time on deeply unserious messaging bills, Congress should be focused on what really matters to the American people, particularly reproductive freedoms.

Right now, across the country, women are suffering from extreme abortion bans that are endangering their health and limiting their ability to make private medical decisions. Women in America are worried about

their reproductive freedoms and deeply concerned about what extremist politicians will attack next. We know that radical judges and politicians are not stopping with abortion bans. They are now attacking fertility treatments and attempting to restrict birth control methods like plan B and IUDs.

If far-right extremists really cared about women, they would want to make the full range of birth control readily available, not restrict access to it.

This Sunday is Mother's Day. How about giving moms and potential moms the gift they really want: the right to decide whether, when, and with whom to have children. Instead of flowers, let's guarantee the right to use the full range of FDA-approved birth control.

In honor of Mother's Day and for this reason, at the appropriate time, I will offer a motion to recommit this bill back to committee. If the House rules permitted, I would have offered the motion with an important amendment to this bill.

My amendment would strike the text of H.R. 7190 and replace it with my Right to Contraception Act, a bill to protect the right to access all forms of FDA-approved birth control and protect women's reproductive health from political interference.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to insert in the Record the text of this amendment immediately prior to the motion to recommit.

For full text, please see H.R. 4121.

Mr. Speaker, I hope my colleagues will join me in voting for the motion to recommit.