Going mostly (but not completely) unnoticed is the following statement in the Republican Party platform: “In order to preserve the principle of one person, one vote, we urge our elected representatives to ensure that citizenship, rather than mere residency, be made the basis for the apportionment of representatives among the states.”

Currently, congressional districts are apportioned based upon total population. If Republicans were able to actually follow through on this, it would mean that areas with large Latino populations, where there are more non-citizens, would lose representation compared to whiter, more Republican districts. It would shift more power in Congress to the Republicans.

But there’s a problem with this aspirational plan, something called the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which provides in Section 2 that “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed.” Last time I checked, non-citizens were still “persons.” So maybe this part of the platform is an oblique call for a constitutional amendment?

Note this issue is a bit different from the issue in the Supreme Court’s recent Evenwel case, in which conservatives from Texas argued that the state had to draw state legislative districts with equal numbers of voters, not total population. That was an argument made under the equal protection clause, which applies to drawing of districts within states, not apportionment among states for Congress. The Supreme Court rejected that argument, but left open the possibility that states could draw legislative districts within states using total voters as the denominator. If a state, like Texas, tries to do that after the 2020 census, I expect there will be a lawsuit claiming that the state must use total population rather than total voters. Total voters is not the same as citizens (think citizen children, felons), but total voters, like total citizens, would create more white Republican districts.

In any case, the proposal in the Republican party platform is not going to be enacted soon, but it does provide fodder for Democrats to argue that the Republican platform is against Latino voting power.

UPDATE: An astute reader points out that because the Republican party proposal involves apportionment for Congress among the states, and not allocation of members of congress or legislative seats within states, this rule would hurt states with large populations.  And it is an empirical question whether those states are states that are Democratic or Republican.

This is a good point.  Here’s a chart of citizenship and non-citizen populations within states. The states with the largest non-citizen populations are: California, Arizona, Texas, New Jersey and New York.  So this could be a wash in terms of the party representation within Congress. It would take more analysis.

But further, once a change was made to do this, I presume the push would be to allow (or require) states doing districting within states to use citizenship only as the basis. And that would lead to a diminution in minority voting power (and doing that may or may not be constitutional).