'Fatal flaw' dooms Marjorie Taylor Greene's citizenship proposal: expert

A proposal by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) on the speeding up the census for political purposes is likely going nowhere despite the enthusiastic backing of Donald Trump.

According to a report from MSNBC, the controversial Georgia Republican took to social media and proposed accelerating the national census –– scheduled for 2030 –– by writing, "In conducting the new census of the U.S. population, it shall require questions determining the citizenship of each individual, and count US citizens only. Upon completion of the census, the bill will direct states to immediately begin a redistricting of all U.S. House seats process using only the population of United States citizens."

That proposal got a big thumbs up from Trump and on-again, off-again ally Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) during a press availability in Florida this past week with the president braying that the two of them "love" the idea.

Not so fast, wrote MSNBC's Ja'Han Jones.

Greene’s Trump-backed proposal would amount to a nakedly political — and unconstitutional — assault on the apportionment process and, thus, the U.S. electoral system," he explained before noting that historian Brendan A. Shanahan stuck a knife in the idea –– which has been proposed before –– back in April.

Jones cited Shanahan writing, "Then, as now, such measures have a fatal flaw at their core: the national constitution unequivocally requires that the ‘whole number’ of all residents in the country—regardless of citizenship status—be counted as part of the country’s population for the purposes of federal reapportionment. But congressional history also teaches that anti-alien bills, however unconstitutional, represent major roadblocks to the operation of federal reapportionment that can metastasize into a veritable constitutional crisis."

Jones added, "Members of Congress are hired to represent all the people who reside in their districts, who include people of varying immigration statuses. After all, citizens aren’t the only ones paying taxes in the United States, so — according to our nation’s founders — it follows that they shouldn’t be the only ones with representation in Congress, either."

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