Every ten years the country counts everybody living in it, and then hands out the 435 seats in the House of Representatives based on that count. That is how it has worked since 1790. Your state's share of the House depends on how many people live there.

On September 15, 2026, Andrew Clyde filed a bill to change who counts.

His bill is H.R. 10377. Its official title says it plainly: it would "exclude noncitizens from the population used for congressional apportionment, to require a revised apportionment prior to certain elections, [and] to require the inclusion of a citizenship question in all future decennial censuses."

Clyde has been calling it the Make Apportionment Great Again Act. He gave Fox News an exclusive heads-up, and Fox headlined that it "could rip House seats from Dem states ahead of next presidential race," as Talking Points Memo noted. The bill would require the new apportionment before the 2028 election.

Forty-two House Republicans signed on as cosponsors. Every one of them signed the same day the bill was filed. Thirty-eight of them are Republicans we cover on this site — thirty-six who are still running, plus Ralph Norman and Andy Ogles, who have since lost their 2026 primaries.

What the Constitution actually says

The rule for who gets counted is not buried in some regulation. It is in the Fourteenth Amendment, and it is one sentence long:

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.

The whole number of persons. Not citizens. Not voters. Persons.

That wording was not an accident. The Fourteenth Amendment was written after the Civil War, and it replaced an older apportionment rule that had counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person. That phrase — "counting the whole number of persons in each State" is the standard the census has been measured against ever since.

Here is the part worth sitting with. When a member files a bill, the House makes them write down where they think Congress gets the power to pass it. Clyde's statement, printed in the Congressional Record on September 15, cites two things: the census clause in Article I, and the Fourteenth Amendment — its enforcement clause, Section 5.

He cited the amendment that says to count the whole number of persons, as his authority for a bill that would stop counting the whole number of persons.

"Noncitizens" is a much bigger group than you may think

Notice the word the bill's own title uses. Not "illegal aliens." Not "undocumented immigrants." Noncitizens.

A green card holder is a noncitizen. So is a nurse here on a work visa, a graduate student, a refugee who was granted asylum, and a grandmother who has lived on the same block for thirty years and pays property taxes on the house. None of them can vote in a federal election. All of them are people, all of them live in somebody's district, and all of them would stop counting toward that district under this bill.

That is a different and broader thing than what the Trump administration proposed a week earlier. On September 9, Commerce announced a draft rule to drop undocumented and temporary immigrants from the 2030 apportionment count, as Roll Call reported. That rule at least names a category. Clyde's bill, on the face of its official title, names everyone who is not a citizen. The full text has not been published yet, so the title is what we have to go on — and the title says noncitizens.

Redoing the map in the middle of the decade

The second piece of the bill is the strangest one, and it has gotten the least attention.

Apportionment happens once, after each census. The 2020 census set the current map. The 2030 census will set the next one. Clyde's bill would order a new apportionment before the 2028 election — in the middle of a decade, off a count nobody has taken yet.

There is no ordinary version of that. It means redrawing which states get how many seats, and therefore how many electoral votes each state casts for president, on a schedule chosen by the party that wrote the bill.

It could cost red states seats too

Here is the part the cosponsors may not have checked.

When the Pew Research Center projected in 2020 what would happen if unauthorized immigrants were left out of that year's count, three states came out behind: California, Florida, and Texas. Each would have ended up with one fewer seat than population change alone would have given it. Alabama, Minnesota, and Ohio would each have held onto a seat they were projected to lose.

Florida and Texas are not blue states. And eleven of the forty-two cosponsors represent those three states, among them Byron Donalds, Randy Fine and Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, Brandon Gill, Keith Self, Michael Cloud and Beth Van Duyne of Texas, and Tom McClintock of California.

A 2025 study published in PNAS Nexus, also cited by Roll Call, found that excluding undocumented immigrants would have had a roughly neutral effect on control of the House and the Electoral College going back to 1980. Neither estimate, Roll Call notes, took into account excluding even legal, temporary immigrants — and this bill, on its title, reaches every noncitizen. But by the numbers that do exist, the thing Fox News sold as a way to rip seats from Democratic states mostly rips seats from big states, and two of the three biggest are Republican-run.

The citizenship question already lost in court

The third piece of the bill would put a citizenship question on every future census.

The Trump administration tried this in 2019 and the Supreme Court stopped it. In Department of Commerce v. New York, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the administration's official reason for adding the question — that it was needed to enforce the Voting Rights Act — was not the real one:

Unlike a typical case in which an agency may have both stated and unstated reasons for a decision, here the VRA enforcement rationale — the sole stated reason — seems to have been contrived.

Be precise about what the Court did and didn't say. It did not rule that asking about citizenship is unconstitutional; it wrote that the census clause "permits Congress, and by extension the Secretary, to inquire about citizenship." What it blocked was the administration lying about why. A bill from Congress would sidestep that specific problem.

What the ruling doesn't fix is the underlying one. The trial court in that case found that adding the question would make noncitizen households less likely to respond at all, and the Supreme Court accepted those findings. An undercount doesn't just cost a state House seats. It costs federal money, which is handed out on the basis of population. The Court's own summary of the harm names it: "diminishment of political representation, loss of federal funds, degradation of census data, and diversion of resources," and it noted that an undercount of noncitizen households "by as little as 2%" would cost states federal dollars. That was the injury that gave the states the right to sue in the first place.

We have written before about how thin the evidence behind this push actually is: the Census Bureau's own report claiming 24,000 noncitizens voted in 2020 had no named authors and no margin of error, and the number amounted to less than 0.019% of the voters it checked. And Byron Donalds has been here before — he joined a lawsuit to throw out the 2020 census count, and a federal court dismissed it twice, calling further argument futile.

Who signed it

H.R. 10377 was referred to the Judiciary Committee and the Oversight and Government Reform Committee on the day it was filed. It has not had a hearing or a vote.

These are the Republicans on this site who put their names on it. Andrew Clyde of Georgia wrote it. These thirty-six, all still running, cosponsored it on September 15:

Andy Barr, Andy Biggs, Andy Harris, Anna Paulina Luna, Barry Moore, Ben Cline, Beth Van Duyne, Brandon Gill, Byron Donalds, Clay Fuller, Clay Higgins, Diana Harshbarger, Eli Crane, Eric Burlison, Gary Palmer, Guy Reschenthaler, Jason Smith, Josh Brecheen, Keith Self, Lauren Boebert, Marlin Stutzman, Mary Miller, Michael Cloud, Mike Collins, Paul Gosar, Pete Stauber, Randy Fine, Rich McCormick, Riley Moore, Russ Fulcher, Scott Perry, Sheri Biggs, Tom McClintock, Tom Tiffany, Tony Wied, and Warren Davidson.

Ralph Norman of South Carolina and Andy Ogles of Tennessee, who have since lost their 2026 primaries, cosponsored it the same day.

What the record shows

Thirty-nine Republicans we cover have put their names on a bill that would stop counting noncitizens — green card holders, visa workers, asylees and all — when the House hands out its 435 seats, force a brand-new apportionment before the 2028 election, and add a citizenship question the Supreme Court blocked in 2019 after finding the government's stated reason for it "contrived." The Fourteenth Amendment says apportionment counts "the whole number of persons in each State," and the bill's own filing cites the Fourteenth Amendment as the authority to do it. When Pew ran the numbers for leaving unauthorized immigrants out of the 2020 count, the states that came out behind were California, Florida, and Texas — and eleven of the cosponsors represent those three states.

Source

Reporting on the bill and its framing: Talking Points Memo, "The GOP's Bill to 'Rip House Seats From Dem States'". Bill text, sponsor, cosponsor list and constitutional authority statement: congress.gov, H.R. 10377. Photo: Megan Varner/Getty Images, via Talking Points Memo.