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On the eve of Independence Day, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is celebrating freedom with her own kind of fireworks: a bill that lights the Constitution on fire.
Greene’s proposing a new bill to force a new Census that only counts U.S. citizens, then redraw every congressional district in America. This would erase millions of people from political representation – which the 14th Amendment guarantees to everyone living in the nation.
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And it’s not just about representation in Congress – Census counts also determine how billions of dollars in federal funding are distributed for schools, hospitals, infrastructure, and public services. If non-citizens are erased, the communities they live in would be underfunded and underserved.
What she’s proposing is a way to sabotage our democracy – dressed up in red, white, and blue. And Donald Trump is loving it.
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Greene’s do-over Census would ask every household about citizenship, and not count anyone who isn’t a citizen, or who’s too afraid to answer. In a climate where Trump’s regime is deploying military troops on American soil and deporting people without due process (including citizens), that fear is the point.
The result? Battleground states with growing immigrant populations – like Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania – would lose congressional seats. Blue states with large immigrant populations – California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Massachusetts – would lose seats, too. It wouldn’t just cost these states political power in terms of the number of U.S. House seats they hold — it would drain them of federal resources tied directly to how many people live there, citizen or not.
This would shift power toward whiter, Republican-leaning states, because they’d comprise a larger share of U.S. House seats.
This isn’t a fringe strategy. Trump tried to rig the Census in his first term by adding a citizenship question. The idea came from GOP gerrymander guru Thomas Hofeller, notorious for North Carolina maps, where Democrats won 49% of the vote statewide in 2018, but Republicans kept 75% of the U.S. House seats.
Hofeller said adding the citizenship question to the Census would be “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.” The Supreme Court blocked it, but did so on procedural grounds, calling Trump’s rationale “contrived.” (This leaves the door open for them to try again now.)
Undeterred by the Supreme Court's ruling, Trump slashed the 2020 Census timeline, installed political appointees to the U.S. Census Bureau, and demanded citizenship data by January 15 – days before leaving office in an attempt to get around the Court’s ruling.
Trump never got the citizenship data, but he still sabotaged the 2020 Census, overcounting white people and undercounting people of color – incorrectly counting 18.8 million people. The final Census data showed why they panicked: white Americans fell to 57.8 percent of the population, the first decline since the Census was started in 1790.
This plan didn’t stop when Trump left office. In 2022, two of the right’s most notorious voter suppression operatives, Cleta Mitchell (Election Integrity Network) and Hans von Spakovsky (The Heritage Foundation) joined a backroom, closed-door panel which urged 200 GOP legislators to draw districts by citizens, not total population. They told the legislators to destroy their notes to avoid discovery in lawsuits.
Now that playbook is back. Trump began his second term by revoking Biden’s Census protections which affirmed that every person living in each state would be included in the Census. Project 2025 recommends partisan appointees run the Census Bureau and mandates a citizenship question – all things Trump tried in his first term and he’s trying again.
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Far-right extremists know America is becoming more multiracial. So they’re pushing to keep it artificially white. This is the same network that tried to overturn the 2020 election. Now they’re trying to redraw the map so they never lose again – even as their voting base shrinks.
Trump’s inner circle has said the quiet part out loud: John Eastman – a Trump attorney who wrote the January 6th coup memo and was disbarred for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election – has argued that 14th Amendment birthright citizenship doesn’t apply to the children of immigrants.
It’s not just about winning elections. It’s about reengineering our republic. Maybe that’s what they mean by “Make America Great Again”?
In the 1920s, Congress not only refused to redraw congressional maps after the census – they locked them in place, denying representation to booming immigrant and urban populations. Then, they rewrote immigration laws using population data from the 1800s, when America was whiter, to reduce the number of immigrants allowed to enter the country under new quotas.
Adolf Hitler praised the Immigration Act of 1924 and Nazi observers believed it meant America was moving in the right direction. A century later, the blueprint for exclusion is still in use.
Just ask New York Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani. He became a citizen in 2018 and now represents Queens. After Mamdani won the New York City mayoral Democratic primary, a Republican congressman said his citizenship should be revoked. Days later, Trump repeated the attack questioning his legitimacy as an American.
And it wasn’t just rhetoric. A secret DOJ memo outlined a strategy to strip citizenship from naturalized Americans.
Trump has been implementing Project 2025 – consolidating power, shielding his regime from accountability, and rewriting the rules of who counts in America. Greene’s bill isn’t a sideshow. It’s a preview. And it must be taken seriously.
So what can we do?
Name the threat. Marjorie Taylor Greene may represent a heavily gerrymandered deep red district in Georgia, but her agenda has national consequences. We need to make sure every American knows she’s pushing to burn down our democracy.
The only way to stop this in Congress is to win more seats by supporting House and Senate candidates in key races. Trump’s “Big Ugly Bill" has already led one Senator to resign ahead his 2026 race – and it’s putting House Republicans in tough districts under the microscope too.
Support the legal teams doing the essential job of fighting Trump in court.
Protect the vote. Trump and his allies are trying to block eligible Americans from voting through the SAVE Act, state-level copycats, and an illegal elections executive order. Check your voter registration and make a plan to vote in upcoming elections and help others do the same (here in Georgia there’s a runoff election scheduled for the Public Service Commission on July 15)
For every step we’ve taken toward a more perfect union, they’re trying to drag us back. This July 4, don’t just celebrate freedom – defend it.
Max Flugrath is the Communications Director at Fair Fight, a non-profit fighting for independent elections and voting rights in Georgia and across the nation.
Paid for by Fair Fight, www.fairfight.com, not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.
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