Do Trump Officials Plan To Break Centuries Of Precedent In Divvying Up Congress?

Recent statements by Census Bureau and Justice Department officials have raised the question of whether the Trump administration plans to diverge from more than two centuries of precedent in how the country's congressional seats and Electoral College votes are divvied up. Since the first U.S. census in 1790, the Constitution has called for a head count every 10 years of "persons" living in the U.S. to determine the number of congressional seats each state gets. Federal law requires the commerce secretary, who oversees the Census Bureau, to deliver those numbers by the end of a census year to the president, who must report them to Congress within a week after the start of its new session.