The Census: No Stranger to Controversy
With the United States Supreme Court’s June decision in Department of Commerce et al. v. New York et al. as to the matter of reinstating a citizenship question to the 2020 census, it is time to look forward to Census Day 2020. Census Day is the reference day for the official count of the United States population and has been designated as April 1st for every decennial census since 1930. However, 229 years ago this month, the very first Census Day was carried out on August 2, 1790 by assistant marshals visiting every household and asking six questions. The resident population of the U.S. on that day was reported to be 3,929,214 persons.
The legal basis for an official enumeration of persons residing in the U.S. is found in Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution. This constitutional provision apportions state congressional representation according to population. Because of the interdependent relationship between population count and congressional representation, matters surrounding the census have never been without controversy. This began with the notorious “Three-Fifths Compromise,“ fiercely debated amongst the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, which gave the Southern slave states increased political power.
With the post-Civil War consideration of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, questions of not only representation, but also voting rights, continued to be contentious. The South stood to again gain ground in Congress with apportionment of representatives now being based on the count of “the whole number of persons in each State.” With former slaves being wholly counted in the census toward apportionment, but with no likely prospect of being granted the right to vote, the framers of the amendment added a provision in Section 2 that reduced U.S. representatives accordingly for any state that denied the vote to any male citizen over the age of 21.
Interestingly, no serious measures were ever taken to reduce the number of representatives for a state as provided in Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment. In Saunders v. Wilkins, 152 F.2d 235 (1945), the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the power to reduce representatives set out in the Constitution solely rests with Congress. Subsequent constitutional amendments and federal voting rights legislation have made Section 2 a minor player among the Fourteenth Amendment powerhouses like citizenship, due process and equal protection. However, it leaves a legacy of controversy and remains integral to the history of how a nation counts its residents.
Read more on the history of the census at Census.gov.
Visit the Washington State Law Library to check out our resources on constitutional history and the Fourteenth Amendment. Some selected materials:
Constitutional Amendments, 1789 to the present
Negotiating the Constitution : The Earliest Debates Over Original Intent
The Framing of the Fourteenth Amendment
The Ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment
No Easy Walk to Freedom : Reconstruction and the Ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment (SC)
