MANCHESTER, Conn.

When it comes to the country's decennial census, the U.S. Constitution could not be any clearer. The census must count "the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed."

It's not fair that this credits people who have entered the country illegally toward representation in the U.S. House and state legislatures, rewarding those states and cities -- mainly jurisdictions run by Democrats, including Connecticut -- that obstruct enforcement of federal immigration law and encourage illegal immigration, but that's what the text requires.

So the Trump administration, a Republican one, is trying to violate the Constitution by removing people who have entered the country illegally from the count, and the issue has gone to the Supreme Court. Connecticut and other immigration law nullifiers have sued, and last week the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.

The spectacular irony here is that while Democrats are scorning President Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, for being an "originalist" -- someone who claims to construe the Constitution according to its text and what it meant when it was enacted -- in the census case the Democrats are the originalists and the Republicans are the ones who want to rewrite the Constitution by executive fiat.

Of course, no constitution can specifically address all circumstances that may become legal disputes over time. At most a constitution can establish mechanisms and principles for government, and applying those principles to new circumstances may induce courts to make some assumptions, even as taking assumptions too far becomes legislating, which courts are supposed to leave to legislatures.

But if constitutions don't mean what they say and what they meant when adopted, they aren't really constitutions at all. The political hypocrisy in the census case suggests that neither side is terribly sincere about its supposed constitutional principles.

xxx

Last week's atrocity in France, the beheading of a teacher by an immigrant religious fanatic, is a reminder of why the United States should get serious about controlling immigration. The teacher had just taught a lesson about freedom of expression under secular government and some of his students and their parents, themselves religious fanatics, took offense and alerted the perpetrator.

This kind of thing has been happening for years throughout Europe because of its failure to control immigration, especially immigration from areas afflicted by theocratic fascism. While the United States enjoys greater distance from those areas, it still has admitted many people who want to overthrow democratic and secular culture.

President Trump has often demagogued the issue, but because their party gains political representation from illegal immigration, most Democrats oppose immigration law enforcement. If the choice is between immigration enforcement with some demagoguery and no enforcement at all, even Trump should prevail.

xxx

It doesn't matter too much whether the laptop computer supposedly abandoned at the repair shop in Delaware was Hunter Biden's and whether the emails supposedly found on it are genuine. While some national news organizations seem unable to put aside their propagandizing and covering up for Hunter's father so they can investigate the matter, the essential point about the Bidens already has been established for anyone who reads closely enough.

That is, when Joe Biden was vice president he helped his dissolute son enrich himself through a business deal in Ukraine, and perhaps in China, deals for which the son had no qualifications except for peddling influence with his father. The vice president took his son with him on official trips for that purpose. While President Trump's business empire posed many conflicts of interest that should have disqualified him before he was nominated and elected, it turns out that Biden was corrupt while in office.

People may find Trump's demeanor, instability and megalomania so outrageous and dangerous, quite apart from his administration's policies, as to excuse the corruption at the top of the Democratic ticket. Indeed, national politics now is so corrupt and demagogic that the public's only defense may be the fastest possible rotation in office between the parties. But whoever wins this election, journalistic fairness and integrity will have been fatal casualties of the campaign.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.