792
Opinion of the Court
ess to make it virtually self-executing, so that the number of Representatives per State would be determined by the Secretary of Commerce and the President without any action by Congress. See S. Rep. No. 2, 71st Cong., 1st Sess., 2-3 (1929) ("The need for legislation of this type is confessed by the record of the past nine years during which Congress has refused to translate the 1920 census into a new apportionment. . . . As a result, great American constituencies have been robbed of their rightful share of representation . . ."); Department of Commerce v. Montana, 503 U. S. 442, 451-452, and n. 25 (1992).
Under the automatic reapportionment statute, the Secretary of Commerce takes the census "in such form and content as [s]he may determine." 13 U. S. C. § 141(a). The Secretary is permitted to delegate her authority for establishing census procedures to the Bureau of the Census. See §§ 2, 4. "The tabulation of total population by States . . . as required for the apportionment of Representatives in Congress . . . shall be completed within 9 months after the census date and reported by the Secretary to the President of the United States." § 141(b). After receiving the Secretary's report, the President "shall transmit to the Congress a statement showing the whole number of persons in each State . . . as ascertained under the . . . decennial census of the population, and the number of Representatives to which each State would be entitled under an apportionment of the then existing number of Representatives by the method known as the method of equal proportions . . . ." 2 U. S. C. § 2a(a). "Each State shall be entitled . . . to the number of Representatives shown" in the President's statement, and the Clerk of the House of Representatives must "send to the executive of each State a certificate of the number of Representatives to which such State is entitled." § 2a(b).
With the one-time exception in 1900 of counting overseas servicemen at their family home, the Census Bureau did not allocate federal personnel stationed overseas to particular
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