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The plaintiffs did not have a very strong argument, since if one-person, one-vote meant that districts had to have equal numbers of voters (whether eligible, registered or whatever measure you want), it would exclude children and legal immigrants from the count, and surely those persons are being represented just as much as voters are. But that’s the only card that the plaintiffs had because Congress permits the Census to count illegal aliens as if they were “inhabitants” of the state in which they are illegally living.

As I’ve been saying since 2004 or so, when the GOP controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency, what we need is for Congress to pass a law mandating that the decennial Census be an actual enumeration of all persons legally living in each state, and clearly setting forth that non-citizens with temporary visas (whether students, tourists, etc.) or without the legal right to live in the U.S. should *not* be counted in the Census for purposes of reapportionment. If illegal aliens aren’t counted when determining how many congressional districts TX would have, then they couldn’t be counting when drawing districts with equal populations of persons counted at the Census. But federal law currently orders the Census Bureau to count all persons living “permanently” in the U.S. even if they are here illegally, and SCOTUS gives great deference to Congress and the President when it comes to the Census (SCOTUS has permitted the Census to count federal employees stationed overseas as residents of the state that they claim as their home, but not to count Mormon missionaries that pay taxes in Utah but are away temporarily because of their one- or two-year religious mission abroad).

So we need to change the law to exclude illegal aliens from the Census count, not try to sue our way to districts with similar numbers of voters.