Four For the Fourth 2019 Part Two Cheating the Census

Every ten years, our nation requires a census to count the number of persons residing in the United States. We do this to apportion US House representation, to establish where the people are living to dole out funding as needed, to figure out the number of Electors per state for elections. It's one of the few direct duties outlined in the Constitution itself.

We're coming up to 2020, another census cycle. And this time, trump and the Republicans want to burn away a part of it by insisting on something that would ensure fewer responses: They want to count citizens not persons... knowing full well the non-citizens - the illegals, the migrant workers, the visa workers, even the naturalized - would be afraid to get caught or punished filling out the census form.

It may have been only one question, but it would have forced an undercounting of actual residents - the Constitution says only persons - to the tune of millions of people. It would cull back any increase of representatives to states where a migrant population would be: Not just the Blue states like California but also key battleground Southwest states like Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and TEXAS (and also Southeastern states like Florida and Georgia where migrant agriculture workers reside). It would reduce funding from federal block grants, screwing up social aid and education money.

The citizenship question would profit the Republicans and screw over the Democrats. It was bullshit.

The Supreme Court recently ruled on this, refusing to answer directly and instead sent the matter back to the White House and Department of Commerce because Chief Justice Roberts couldn't accept their lying lame excuse for the citizenship question. As a result, there were fears and rumors among the punditry that trump would try again, delay the census altogether, or outright ignore the courts and force a Constitutional showdown.

A few days ago, the story got out that the DOJ was no longer delaying the publication of the census and that the Commerce Department was going to start working on it as June 30th was the latest they could go without tripping over their timetable (I've done census work before as Enumerator, trust me there's a multi-stage process to the whole thing and everything's on deadline).

And then trump tweeted it out (via Cheryl Rofer at Balloon Juice) that he still wants his damned citizenship question:

A federal judge, George Jarrod Hazel, involved in the enforcement of the decision happened to be on Twitter and caught the tweet. He called a teleconference among the relevant lawyers. The transcript is here, and something of a hoot. It’s relatively short and worth reading, but I’ll excerpt some of the good parts...

One of the plaintiffs’ lawyers asks for a stipulated order that the printing go ahead without the question and a provision that the defendants not communicate the contrary to the public. Judge Hazel is concerned that they are talking about issuing the order to the President.

From another of the plaintiffs’ lawyers:

The President’s tweet has some of the same effects that the addition of the question would in the first place and some of the same effects on the 18-month battle that was just waged over the citizenship question. It leaves the immigrant communities to believe that the Government is still after information that could endanger them. If you add that to the interview that the President did, sharing that his reason for wanting the citizenship question on the form was so that the Government could distinguish between citizens and illegal aliens and how nonsensical that is, it has the effect of leading the public to believe that the Census is not only after that information but is willing to violate some of the provinces of protection that our plaintiff organizations have been trying to reassure communities about.
So we strongly believe that we’re going to need some affirmative commitment, whether it’s through a stipulation or by order of this Court, an affirmative commitment from the Government to counter misinformation wherever in the Government that it comes from, a commitment that they will respond quickly and comprehensively to that kind of misinformation.

Uh-huh, looks like she’s talking about the President...

The judge wants them all back in court this Friday. I hope Hazel throws the Large Print copy of Blackstone at the DOJ lawyers' heads.

trump meanwhile is mulling an Executive Order, directly ignoring the courts and performing an act of executive overreach that would have serious repercussions for our federal system of Checks and Balances. He's essentially daring the Judiciary to hold him in contempt, he's essentially threatening Congress to mess with their necessary reapportionment for the coming decade.

I pray to God the judge overseeing this matter does hold trump and his officers in contempt here. trump is pursuing not only an illegal and racist policy decision, he's threatening the entire legal system with this stance.

Hold him accountable, dammit.

A question to Erick Erickson

Far Right commentator Erick Erickson (why he gets hired with CNN while honest journalism grads like me stay unemployed, I'll never understand) made recent comments about the It's-That-Time-of-The-Decade federal Census:

ERICKSON: This is crazy. What gives the Commerce Department the right to ask me how often I flush my toilet? Or about going to work? I’m not filling out this form. I dare them to try and come throw me in jail. I dare them to. Pull out my wife’s shotgun and see how that little ACS twerp likes being scared at the door. They’re not going on my property. They can’t do that. They don’t have the legal right, and yet they’re trying.

Seeing as how the Commerce Dept. is going to hire me later this month to work part-time as a Census Enumerator, I have a personal question and request for Mr. Erickson:

If it turns out I have to be the little (6-foot-1-inch tall, 300 lb) ACS twerp (I think of myself more as a smartass, actually) knocking at your door, can I go ahead and make arrangements with you to have you shoot me in a non-lethal location?  Say, with me standing in Yeehaw Junction FL and you standing in the Colorado Supermax for taking shots at a federal employee?

I know, I sound like a smartass over here, but seriously these Far Right wingnuts are totally going off the cliff here.  They're all getting paranoid and talking smack about a perfectly legal government function that's been done every decade since this nation was formed under the aegis of the Constitution.  They're all working themselves up into a froth all because this year for some godforsaken reason they're convinced that ZOMG OBAMA ZOMBIE SOCIALISTS ARE GONNA USE THE CENSUS TO EAT OUR BRAINS.

I figure part of the reason the wingnuts are acting up is that in their zeal to hate the federal government they're picking on what have been normal nearly every-day functions of the government.  They rant about service at the DMV (those are state-level functions, and they're actually pretty good in most states).  They rant about the Postal Service (again, the USPS does okay but its problems are that they are losing money as letter-writing gets replaced by emailing and faxing).  They rant about the massive waste and fraud in the national defense budget.   They rant about ANYTHING having to do with the federal government because because because.  Because any effective government program makes their "Government is BAD" meme look foolish or worse a pack of lies.

But this year this term of office, the Far Right are - as I mentioned earlier - going completely over the cliffs.  And a lot of that has to do with their paranoid hatred of Obama.  His being in the White House amps everything up to 11.  Considering they honestly don't HAVE anything on Obama the way they did with Clinton (the previous "questionable" Democrat who dared interrupt the Glorious GOP Revolution that began under Reagan), it just somehow makes it worse because they have to fabricate outrage over everything that doesn't deserve it.

I'm serious here.  Where were these paranoid freaks back in the last census ten years ago?  Was Michelle Bachmann ranting against the Census when she was in the Minnesota State Senate in 2000?  We've had roughly 21 different Census takings over 220 years this nation has existed.  How many complaints were there about the 1990 Census?  My dad was working as an Enumerator back then, did he do anything wrong with your statistics, Mr. Erickson?

Now I admit there was a slight problem with the Census in 1980, but that was quietly resolved with a side order of fava beans and a nice Chianti.  After that, of course...

There was a Census back in 1860: I guarantee you it had nothing to do with the following Civil War (which was fought over slaves no wait States' Rights to be total jerkasses no wait the future peanut industry).  There was a Census after the Civil War ended in 1870: did the Southern states complain about how they were counting people (well, maybe in South Carolina...)?  And there was nothing wrong about the Census back then either: hell, the Census in 1870 was epic because a census taker in San Francisco officially labeled Joshua Norton with the career of Emperor on his tally sheet (click link, scroll 2/3 of the way down, under the pg. 81 spreadsheet).  That was totally awesome!  I can't wait to enumerate, I wonder how many Emperors I'll run into when I do.

Oh, and Mr. Erickson?  I'm really not afraid of you, so I *will* knock on your door if I have to.  And I have to, it'll be my job.  And you'll HAVE to answer the very legal requirements of the Census, per the US Code Title 13, Sections 141, 193, and 221.  Come at me with your wife's skirt shotgun and I'll just list it as a dependent.