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Let me tell you about the chatter I am increasingly hearing from those in the know here in Montana: we have a shot at getting a second seat in the US House of Representatives. Even with our state's very poor response rate during the latest US Census count? Yes. At least that is what I am hearing.

Montana used to have two members of the US House of Representatives. Ron Marlenee (R-MT) represented the East, and Pat Williams (D-MT) represented the West, but we lost the extra seat in the 1990s due to our low population. With Montana recently crossing the 1 million population mark, insiders are increasingly optimistic that we could get that second seatback.

Here's the challenge: with illegal immigrants constantly flooding into other states, those numbers have been included in Census counts, and therefore Congressional representation has been based, in part, due to the illegal immigration numbers in the count. How can Montana compete with that?

Here's why I think folks are increasingly optimistic, especially this week. As Fox News Radio reports:

The Supreme Court will listen to arguments over whether or not President Trump can exclude unauthorized immigrants from the census count, which is typically used to allocate state seats for the House of Representatives. If Trump wins the case, this could lead to millions of peoplei n places like Texas, California, and New Jersey to lose congressional seats, according to the New York Times. This would change the agreement of the census counts, which allows illegal immigrants to be counted towards the population regardless of their status. This could have the potential to shift congressional seats from Democratic states to Republican ones. Trump’s team says they are allowed to exclude unauthorized immigrants.

 

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