Hello, this is Michael Moss.

Heather Cox Richardson is traveling today,

and her travel arrangements did not allow her time to read today's letter.

So I will be reading it in her place.

August 7, 2025.

At 722 this morning, President Donald J. Trump posted on social media,

I have instructed our Department of Commerce to immediately begin work on a new and highly

accurate census based on modern day facts and figures, and, importantly,

using the results and information gain from the presidential election of 2024, people who

are in our country illegally will not be counted in the census. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Trump has no power to change the timing of the U.S. census, which is mandated by the Constitution

to take place every 10 years. He also has no power to declare that undocumented immigrants

won't be counted. The Constitution

specifies that representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their

respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state. Magoturns sometimes to

the 14th Amendment's exclusion of Indians not taxed from the count for

representation as proof that lawmakers recognize that some people should be excluded from the

census.

But in fact, not taxed, identified a group of people who did not come under the purview of the United

States government. Just a year after the Civil War, lawmakers looked at the crisis caused by

southern enslavers who had wielded outsized political power because the Constitution had allowed

them to count enslaved Americans for purposes

...