Kansas Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach told SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Saturday that the current system of congressional apportionment which counts all residents, whether they are United States citizens or not, “grossly distorts representation in Congress.”
During an interview with Breitbart News’ Political Editor Matt Boyle and Deputy Political Editor Amanda House, Kobach said the current system of apportioning congressional districts — where all residents of the district are counted rather than just the citizens of the district — leads to misrepresentation in Congress and gives states flooded with large illegal alien and foreign-born populations more power than other states.
Kobach said:
The reason you need to know if a person is a citizen or not is because, right now, we’re apportioning congressional districts just by the number of warm bodies in that district. Citizen, noncitizen, legal alien, illegal alien, they’re all counted the same, which is not how our system was designed. That is not what the founding fathers intended. [Emphasis added]
And so, as a result, you have places in California where half the district almost is illegal aliens and that person is getting the same representative, one representative for about 710,000 people, as someone in a district elsewhere in the country where all of those people in that district are citizens.
And it means that the 300,000 or so people who are eligible to vote in the district with all the illegal aliens, they have twice as much voting power. They have a representative in Congress for half the number of people. [Emphasis added]
So, it grossly distorts representation in Congress. It means that states that encourage illegal immigration, like California, get more representatives in Congress, get more electoral votes, and their voters get more voting power than the rest of us. [Emphasis added]
If Congress is going to fix this problem, which I believe they should and they must, they at least have to have the starting information which is how many of the people in each state are citizens and how many people are not.
Listen to the full interview with Kobach here:
President Donald Trump’s administration announced last month that they would be putting the U.S. citizenship question back on the 2020 Census, and residents will now be asked if they are citizens, as Breitbart News reported.
Since 1950, the citizenship question has not been asked on the full Census, leaving the nation without an exact estimate of how many citizens are in the country and how many noncitizens and illegal aliens are in the country.
As Breitbart News reported in detail, counting American citizens on the 2020 Census is likely to shift power away from coastal states harboring large illegal alien populations and towards middle America.
For example, California has an estimated three million illegal aliens, a total of about 5.3 million noncitizens, and a total population of about 39.5 million residents. Currently, California has 53 congressional seats, the most in the country.
If California’s congressional districts were set by the number of citizens in the state, it would potentially lose three to five congressional seats, leaving the state with about 48 to 50 seats.
Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.