Hi Paul, In other constitutional amendment news, Rep. Candice Miller is calling for a new amendment as well. I've posted about it over at The American Sector. Her proposal would limit the census to count only citizens of the United States. The result would change Section 2 of the 14th Amendment, which currently doles out House seats on the basis of "the whole number of persons in each state". The end result would be a major re-apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives and votes in the electoral college, with CA as the biggest loser.

yikes, that has some nasty undertones, and not just the 3/5 business -- isn't there a powerful taxation without representation angle too?

From a strictly political standpoint though I wonder whether it would be so bad for Democrats -- isn't there, for instance, a huge illegal immigrant population in Texas as well?

Term limits have always just seemed to me to imply that voters are too dumb to do the job themselves… kind of like the electorical college. I mean if people don’t want a third term president than just simply don’t vote for one, it doesn’t seem necessary to have any more protection than that

The proposed 14th amendment amendment makes no distinction between illegal immigrants and legal immigrants; CA has a much higher non-citizen population than any other state. Stats from the 2000 Census are online at http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/foreign/ppl-145/tab04-1C.pdf and show that states in the West & NE would lose around 11 million people under the new method of counting, whereas states in the South & Midwest would only lose around 6.5 million people.

And if taxation without representation had any currency, a half-million DC residents would have representation as well. (I always wonder if people would find it as palatable if the entire state of Wyoming, which has fewer residents than DC, were suddenly disenfranchised instead. Somehow, I doubt it...)