Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty of Tennessee sought to defend his push to exclude noncitizens from census counts by invoking the Three-Fifths Compromise—in which slaves counted as only three-fifths of a person when determining apportionment of U.S. House seats.

The comment came during a Friday appearance on Fox Business, in which Hagerty was seeking to advocate for and defend a new bill he introduced that would require a citizenship question on the decennial census and would count only U.S. citizens for apportionment of U.S. House districts and Electoral College votes.

Hagerty said blue states are "backfilling" population loss of U.S. citizens with "illegal aliens," which he said the Founding Fathers would never have accepted. He said his legislation would end that by only factoring citizen

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