GOP to Fight Census Power Grab
Required by Article 1, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution, every 10 years the federal government conducts a count of the citizens of this grand republic. The count is used to determine the number of each state’s congressional delegation.
Historically, there have been tremendous battles in the actual creation of congressional seats, with both parties fighting over where to draw the lines for individual districts. Each party seeks to maximize its membership in the House of Representatives by drawing district lines in ways that benefit them.
Those battles have sometimes gone to ridiculous lengths, such as in the early 1800s when Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry drew such a convoluted electoral map of this state that one district was said to look like a salamander.
To this day, the act of drawing those oddly shaped districts, which sometimes go to great length to capture a handful of Democrat or Republican voters and thereby ensure a majority for the party drawing the district, is known as Gerrymandering, in honor of Gov. Gerry.
While the battles have always been over the RESULTS of the census, over the past decade Democrats have tried to control the way the ACTUAL count is conducted in order to guarantee Democrat majorities.
For the Democrats, simply counting the citizens of the country and allocating districts based on the count is not enough. They say actually going door-to-door to count heads misses minority voters and therefore leads to minority under-representation in Congress.
So, they’ve come up with a plan to use statistical sampling to boost the numbers of minority and Democrats. Since they can’t always find enough minorities and Democrats when actually counting real humans, the Democrats want to pretend that there are voters where there are none.
This is similar to the “disparate impact” analysis, leftist malcontents in the housing industry used to browbeat banks into making loans to people who could not repay. Using bogus “analysis,” groups like Acorn, National Community Reinvestment Coalition and others threatened to bring suit against lenders for discrimination against minorities in lending, even though no actual discrimination had been found.
The disparate impact analysis would find the potential for possible discrimination based on the statistics of the banks actual lending, again even though no actual discrimination had been reported.
Basically the Democrats want to to cook the books through the Census in a similar fashion and in a way that guarantees them a majority.
From the NRO:
According to Bruce Chapman, a former Census director, if politicians control the Census, you may well get an order to adjust the Census count with “samples” and “modeling” that override the scientific consensus of the statisticians at the Bureau. Another career professional at the Census Bureau told the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund that the only reason for such high-level White House involvement was politics, not science.
The Clinton administration tried this, but was stopped by a U.S. Supreme Court decision basically saying, “sorry guys, stick to the actual headcount.”
Well, now come the corrupt The Obama regime, which has moved the Census Bureau out of the relatively independent Commerce Department (still an administration agency) into the White House, under the watchful hyper-partisan eye of Rham Emanuel.
This was largely the reason that Sen. Judd Gregg abandoned his newly appointed post at the head of Commerce. He didn’t want to be the Rebulican chump providing a gloss of legitimacy to this naked power grap.
According to Michelle Malkin, it looks like Republicans have decided to fight The Obama on this, as well they should:
A Senate committee has scheduled a hearing next month on the potential change. Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee are also pushing for an investigation.
GOP leaders sent Obama a letter to the White House on Wednesday demanding a reversal of the plan.
“If the president doesn’t acquiesce to our letter, then we will seek the courts,” said Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., a ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said at a news conference Thursday.
At the news conference Thursday, House Republican leaders announced the formation of a census task force to keep an eye on developments. Republicans displayed a large placard with a 2006 quote from White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel that read, “If you think redistricting is always partisan and political which it is…it’s going to be on steroids this time.”
Republicans are the minority in both house of Congress. But at least in the Senate they have enough votes to truly gum up any effort by the Democrats. By sticking to their guns and using the filibuster, Republicans can cripple the Senate’s legislative agenda. And they should. The census power grab must be stopped.
Michelle Malkin asks, “Whose ready to sue?” I hope some group joins this battle. They can count on a donation from me.
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