Press Releases

Today, the House of Representatives will vote on H.R. 7109, the Equal Representation Act, which would (1) require a question on the citizenship status of each member of a household as part of the decennial census, and (2) change the requirement in the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment to exclude non-citizens from the national head count used to apportion congressional seats in the House. Chairs of the Tri-Caucus, including the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus (CAPAC), Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), and Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) have recommended their Members vote against this legislation. 

Leaders of the Tri-Caucus, including CAPAC Chair Rep. Judy Chu (CA-28), CBC Chair Rep. Steven Horsford (NV-04), CHC Chair Rep. Nanette Barragán (CA-44), and CAPAC First-Vice Chair Rep. Grace Meng (NY-06) released the following joint statement: 

“Before a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic disrupted the 2020 Census, the disgraced former president, his Cabinet, and his allies in Congress were doing everything in their power to terrify immigrant communities into non-participation and deprive them of the investments and federal resources that come with accurate census counts. House Republicans gleefully are taking that baton with today’s vote, violating our nation’s laws and Constitution to try to centralize power in the hands of the wealthy and well-connected. The Fourteenth Amendment, in part, repealed the shameful provision in the Constitution that counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for purposes of apportionment; with today’s vote, House Republicans are quite literally trying to turn back the clock to 1860.

“In practice, the bizarrely named ‘Equal Representation Act’ would undercount citizens living in mixed-status families and households and misallocate trillions of dollars in vital federal and state resources for schools, hospitals, roads and bridges, veterans’ centers and more for a decade. Thankfully, the Senate won’t pass this legislation and the Biden-Harris Administration strongly opposes it. But today’s vote is yet another blaring warning alarm of how Republicans would govern with a viciously anti-democratic agenda if they secured control of Congress and the White House.”

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