For six years, President Donald Trump has been trying to fix a problem almost nobody in Washington wanted to talk about: The United States hands out congressional seats partly on the basis of people who have no legal right to be there. This week, his administration attempted a major overhaul of the United States census and finally moved to correct that, and it did so the right way, through a formal rule that will survive the scrutiny his first attempt did not.

The Census Bureau’s proposal, filed this week for publication in the Federal Register, aims to exclude illegal immigrants and certain categories of non-permanent legal residents from the population counts used to divide the House of Representatives’ 435 seats among the states. It is a long-overdue correction, and conservatives should say so plainly rather than hedge around it.