Supreme Court To Decide If Illegal Aliens Should Be Counted In Legislative Districts

Supreme Court To Decide If Illegal Aliens Should Be Counted In Legislative Districts

The highest court in the land is poised to decide whether or not criminals who have entered our country illegally should be awarded the benefit of legislative representation in Congress. The Daily Caller reports:

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The Supreme Court is taking up a case intended to settle if states should only count residents who are eligible to vote as opposed to the entire population when legislative districts are drawn for their state legislatures.

The case, put forth by two Texas residents with funding from the organization the Project on Fair Representation, targets states with massive numbers of illegal immigrants.

Like other states Texas’ legislative districts are based upon the total number of individuals in the district, both non-citizen and citizen alike. However, the plaintiffs say that the set up violates the constitutional mandate of one person, one vote. This mandate goes back to a 1964 Supreme Court case ruling that declared legislative districts are required to have around the same number of people as other districts.

However, this case will determine if the state will be forced to count all residents in the district, not just eligible voters. Edward Blum of the Project on Fair Representation told The Daily Caller that districts with a smaller amount of eligible voters would have as much political if not more political representation than those districts with a larger population of eligible voters.

For example, the case points to a rural district in northeast Houston with 584,000 eligible voters, while a nearby urban district has only 372,000 eligible voters.

Susan Carlson of the American Civil Rights Union welcomes the case telling TheDC it is “very good news.”

“The American Civil Rights Union did a brief I worked on asking the court to do this,” Carlson said. “This is not good news for those who have been using illegal aliens and non citizens to apportion political power.”

It’s amazing that the conversation surrounding illegal immigrants is one centered on what we can do for them instead of being a conversation centered on how we can remove the trespassers from our sovereign nation.

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