After President Barack Obama nominated his second Commerce Secretary candidate in two weeks,
his uber-liberal core constituency began screeching that his “big
tent” was “bursting
at the seams.”
A grand
jury investigation
into state contracts for political donors had forced New Mexico governor
Bill Richardson to drop out and Obama tapped New Hampshire Republican Sen. Judd Gregg. California Rep. Barbara Lee petulantly decried Gregg's complaints over Clinton Administration Census Bureau methods.
Gregg didn't refuse to fund
the Census, as Lee wants the public to believe. He objected to Clinton
administration attempts to “redraw their congressional districts”
and reallocate federal grants to states with “statistical sampling” adjustments. The Supreme Court
ruled against Census use of statistical sampling to reapportion the 435 House
of Representative seats in the 1999 case Commerce
Department v. U.S. House. Alas, the high court did not outlaw statistical
samples methods to redistrict within states. But Lee got her
way: Gregg too dropped out on February 12, citing his dissatisfaction with
the administration's handling
of the census and
stimulus packages
Thus, the “recurrent fantasy
of Census critics on the Left” remains, to revise “population numbers
more to their liking,”
observes former Census chief Bruce Chapman (1981-1983). If successful,
such a feat would redistribute power and funds for least a decade -- and
could permanently damage America's political landscape and its carefully
constructed internal balance of power.
Nevertheless, President Obama relaunched the notion into political play
on February 5. The
Census Census Bureau will report directly to his Chief of Staff for
the 2010 decennial count. Wresting Census from Commerce Department to
White House control threatens “reckless politicization
of the Census Bureau.”
It could project “the image of a Chicago-style partisan power play” -- and
corrupt all fundamental data sustaining U.S. national statistics.
Obama is a Daley-style Democrat,
though, and Democratic party stalwarts since Jimmy Carter have broadly
supported deploying the Census to their permanent political advantage.
In 1978, President Carter ordered immigration enforcement officers not
to arrest illegal aliens without executive branch approval, reports
retired senior INS investigator Michael Cutler, who afterwards sarcastically
labeled them “pre-citizens.” Angry immigration enforcement officers
nationwide adopted Cutler's term to protest Carter's outrageous political
maneuver.
Over law enforcement objections,
Democrats have been monkeying with the Census ever since. Besides Obama,
the chief culprits today are partisans like New York City Rep. Carolyn
Maloney, a former ranking member of the House Subcommittee on Federalism
and the Census, who want Obama to appoint former Census chief Kenneth Prewitt to head the 2010 Census. Prewitt advocated
“statistical sampling” to reapportion House seats under Clinton,
until the Supreme Court nixed it in 1999.
Then, as now, Democrats coveted
statistical projection to enumerate for the census rather than counting
individuals one by one. Opponents correctly recognize “the proposal
as a violation of the Constitution, which calls for 'actual enumeration',”
and an obvious ploy to bolster Democratic standing in congressional
redistricting following the census, according to the Los Angeles Times.
In politics, though, pretense
is everything.
As “one of our country's
premier scientific agencies,” the Census Bureau “should be accorded
the status of peers such as NASA, the National Institutes of Health,
and the National Science Foundation,” Maloney said last September,
on introducing the “Restoring the Integrity of American Statistics
Act of 2008”
to make it independent in 2012. With backing from the census chiefs
of the last seven presidents, from Richard M. Nixon to George W. Bush,
Maloney heralded the bill as “a clear signal to Americans that the
agency they depend upon for unbiased monthly economic data as well as
the important decennial portrait of our nation is independent, fair,
and protected from interference.” It went no where, although Maloney
plans to reintroduce the bill this session.
Yet in February 2009, Maloney
sings a different tune. “Obama won the election. Ultimately he's the
boss anyway,” says a staff member, waving her true political colors.
Therefore, the argument goes, it doesn't matter whether the Census Bureau
reports to the White House or Commerce. And on Feb. 12, Maloney claimed
that former Census chiefs' concerns over the Obama administration Census
agency hijacking amount to a “page from Seinfeld...a show about
nothing.”
Chapman and Charles Louis Kincannon (Census chief, 2002-2008) vociferously
disagree. Science should be scientific. Statisticians almost universally
reject adjusting numbers. It follows that having Census report to the
White House---which has previously never been done---would turn statistical
science “into something where speculation and guesswork could introduce
egregious and prejudicial errors.”
It is bad enough that the Constitutional
Census clause does not distinguish between citizens and non-citizens.
The founding fathers would undoubtedly have cast it differently had
they envisioned a time when illegal aliens would distort the rights
of citizens to fair representation.
“Undocumented is synonymous
with unauthorized and illegal,” observes Connecticut
Data Center manager
Orlando J. Rodriguez at the University of Connecticut. Illegal aliens,
if counted, will “distort the relative voting power of all citizens
nationwide,” thereby influencing “America's representative political
system.” Excluding non-voters from congressional reapportionment would
provide a much broader geographical dispersement of House seats, and
fairer citizen and voter representation, he found in 2007 and subsequent
studies. The converse is to allow illegal alien settlement to generate
Congressional seats for southern border states at the expense of citizens
and voters in northern and mid-western states.
Most disconcerting, however,
is Democrats' “plain hope” to leverage illegal aliens via controversial
sampling and computer modeling to “'adjust' the Census numbers in
2010,” and further distort citizens' relative voting power. Surely,
Americans should not tolerate a political party redistributing power
and funds away from citizens by riding roughshod over the Constitutional
requirement for actual numeration.
“Let's see,” Chapman quips
of Democratic concerns. Obama Commerce nominee Gregg “cannot be trusted,
but the Democratic politicos in the West Wing can?”
By commandeering the Census
Bureau, Obama may hope to orchestrate a silent political coup. If so,
however, key House Democrats insist this amounts to “nothing.”