Hans: I’ve come around on the issue of counting illegal aliens. It’s true that you’re not likely to get people to tell a representative of the government that they’re illegal aliens, but a box to check asking whether you are a citizen or legal permanent resident (green-card holder) of the United States would work, because lots of people legally here would not check it either — foreign students et al. And there’s a good case for counting only citizens and permanent residents for purposes of apportionment (I don’t think green-card holders could be excluded even under a narrow definition of “persons” in the 14th Amendment). But my concern with the Vitter amendment is that it’s too late to make those changes now — hundreds of millions of census forms have already been printed and will be mailed out in just a few months. This is something that should have been done a year ago, at least, and would have been, if our warnings had been heeded. The Republican party, if it were anything but the feckless collection of screw-ups that it is (and, yes, I’m a Republican) would make this a campaign issue so maybe we can fix this for the 2020 census.