But the Supreme Court struck down the president's proposal in January as a violation of the federal Census Act's mandate that the decennial census be a head count, a decision endorsed by the monitoring board, a congressional agency.
42.
Because this court finds that the Census Act prohibits the use of statistical sampling to determine the population for the purpose of apportionment of representatives among the states, there is no need to reach the constitutional questions presented.
43.
Plaintiff claims that using statistical sampling to supplement the headcount enumeration used to apportion representatives among the states violates the Census Act, 13 U . S . C ., and Article I, section 2, clause 3 of the Constitution.
44.
In 1976, Congress amended the Census Act of 1954 to allow the secretary of commerce to conduct the census " in such form and content as he may determine, including the use of sampling procedures and special surveys ."
45.
The administration takes the view that a statistical adjustment for those purposes could proceed _ and under one reading of the Census Act would, in fact, be required _ even if the court ruled it out for apportionment purposes.
46.
The court's majority of Justices O'Connor, Anthony Kennedy, William H . Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas accepted the census undercount as a fact but determined that the 1954 Census Act and later amendments expressly prohibited sampling for apportionment.
47.
In its unanimous, 71-page decision, the three-judge panel cited the constitutional requirement for a census every 10 years as well as the federal Census Act in concluding that U . S . law calls for a head count of the population.
48.
O'Connor, in further explaining why the Census Act bars statistics, wrote that no member of Congress during the debate on the 1976 revision to the law ever said the amendment would allow statistics to be part of the decennial population survey.
49.
House Republicans challenged the sampling plan in federal court and won a significant victory on Aug . 24 when a three-judge panel agreed that it was illegal under the federal Census Act to base reapportionment on anything but an actual population enumeration.
50.
Whatever strength there is to the claim that using statistical sampling in the apportionment enumeration does not violate the Census Act comes from the fact that section 195 must be read together with the other provision addressing sampling methodologies : section 141 ( a ).
