Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), who was recently (and inexplicably) re-elected after a scandal involving prostitution and an alleged diaper fetish, knows who to blame for Louisiana’s recent loss of a congressional seat in post-Census reapportionment: illegal immigrants in other states. He’s definitely on to something here. Surely Louisiana’s slower population growth relative to other states couldn’t have anything to do with a certain hurricane that devastated the state’s biggest city and drove a large portion of the black population out of the state entirely—making Vitter’s road to re-election this year that much easier. No, it’s definitely the fault of illegal immigrants. Here’s what Vitter told Politico:
“Louisiana stands to lose clout in Congress, while states that welcome illegal immigrants stand to unfairly benefit from artificially inflated population totals,” the Republican senator said in a statement Tuesday.
Politico notes that Louisiana “also” lost residents due to Hurricane Katrina, and reminds readers of Vitter’s failed 2009 effort to try to force a question about citizenship onto the census questionnaire. What the paper doesn’t mention, however, is that Vitter is really complaining about the Constitution, which mandates that the Census count “persons” (and 3/5 of every slave), not just “citizens.” So sorry, Senator: to fix this “problem” of yours, you’re probably going to need a constitutional amendment. Of course, it might be easier to save Louisiana’s extra congressional district if you built a time machine and went back to tell your Republican friend George W. Bush not to gut the Federal Emergency Management Agency and urge him not to hand its reins to the failed, fired head of the International Arabian Horse Association. Just a thought.
