Deeply deeply troubling Obama development. President b. Hussein is removing the Census from the Commerce department and moving it to the White House. Bear in mind that President O has allocated one billion dollars in the porkulous package for the already automatically funded census taking.
Look at the seal of the Bureau of the Census. It was the intent of the framers of the this great country (the first census after the American Revolution was taken in 1790 under Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson) to keep the census out of partisan hands. This move by ACORN organizer and current President seems a deliberate violation of the Constitution. And yes, I think his ACORN days (illegal voter registrations etc) and the gaming of the Census data are tied.
Is this another reason why the 'President' named Judd Gregg as Commerce secretary - to cite "conflict of interest"? Scary, eh?
The United States Census is a decennial census mandated by the United States
Constitution.[1] The population is enumerated every 10 years and the results are used to allocate Congressional seats (congressional apportionment), electoral votes, and government program funding.[2] Some states or local jurisdictions also conduct local censuses.
The census is performed by the United States Census Bureau. The first census after the American Revolution was taken in 1790 under Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson; there have been 21 federal censuses since that time.[2] The last national census was held in 2000, and the next census is scheduled for 2010.
This from Director of the Census from 1981 to '83 in the Reagan
Administration, posted here:
Everyone
knows that it is possible to organize a Decennial Census in a way that
benefits one party or another politically. One way to effectuate this
otherwise unpalatable departure from the Census Bureau's two hundred
year history of non-partisanship is to put the Bureau administratively
under direction of the politicos in the White House. In reality that
would be a sure invitation to cook the books on the highly
consequential count of Americans.
Advocates argue that putting the 2010 Census under direct White
House control somehow assures a higher priority to its mission. This is
cynical. It puts a priority on manipulation of carefully derived Census
criteria. The only reason the White House would want to be involved is
in figuring out how to add more voting power to certain states and
groups within states.
Simply put, there is no excuse for this idea. it is not true that the
Census Bureau has ever been under the direct management of the White
House, and for good reason. Even if angels were in charge of the
Executive Mansion, if the nation's premier statistical agency were
placed under White House direction the danger to public trust would be
enormous. The Decennial count is one of the few federal functions
specifically described in the Constitution itself and must be operate
above suspicion of politics.
I was Director of the Census from 1981 to '83 in the Reagan
Administration. I always was made to feel conscious of the sound public
servants who had preceded me and, regardless of who appointed them,
defended the decennial count. . I have known directors from the Kennedy
era (the estimable Richard Scaammon) to the G. W. Bush Administration
(the very professional Louis Kincannon). I don't know anyone who cares
for the integrity of the Bureau and its products who would desire to
see the Census Bureau report directly to the White House.
Power flows from an accurate Census Count. Everyone involved for
years has seen the count therefore a sacred trust. It must not be
polluted with even a semblance of Presidential meddling.
Tom over at Bizzy Blog has the best reportage here:
The power grab continues. My bet is that Old Media will also
maintain its studied ignorance of this development, despite years of
whining about alleged Executive Branch excesses during the Bush
administration.
Now it looks like Barack Obama’s inner circle is going to teach the
Census Bureau how to count in 2010. CQpolitics.com this morning
reported that the White House is taking the next decennial census away
from the Commerce Department, and keeping it for itself.
The reason given why Commerce is supposedly not up to the job is
that nominee Judd Gregg of New Hampshire fought Bill Clinton in the
mid-1990s over “emergency funding” for the 2000 census that was really
an attempt by the Clinton administration to cook the books.
Here’s the meat of what CQpolitics.com reported:
The director of the Census Bureau will report directly
to the White House and not the secretary of Commerce, according to a
senior White House official.
The decision came after black and Hispanic leaders raised questions
about Commerce Secretary nominee Judd Gregg ’s commitment to funding
the census.
Gregg, New Hampshire’s senior senator, voted in committee and on the
floor for a 1995 Republican budget that envisioned the elimination of
the Commerce Department. Of even more concern to black and Hispanic
leaders, Gregg battled President Clinton over a request for “emergency”
funding for the 2000 census.
The back story that this report did not pick up is this, as taken from an itself heavily-biased June 3, 1998 story at the Los Angeles Times (bolds are mine):
Commenting on a dispute that has become highly partisan, President Clinton on Tuesday argued for the use of statistical sampling techniques for the next U.S. census, promising that the method would avoid the 1990 undercounting of minorities and children.
“It’s not about politics. It’s about
people,” Clinton declared to applause at a community center in a Latino
neighborhood of Houston. “It’s about making sure that every
American–literally and really–counts.”
Against a backdrop of one of the most undercounted cities in the nation, he added: “Nobody’s got an ax to grind.”
Actually, the once-a-decade exercise of counting America’s heads has turned into a fiercely partisan matter. The
Democratic White House wants to introduce statistical projections into
the year 2000 census and not depend solely on counting individuals one
by one. Republicans generally have assailed the proposal as a violation
of the Constitution, which calls for “actual enumeration,” and a ploy by Democrats to bolster their standing when districts are redrawn after the census.
“This just opens the door to tremendous political corruption,”
said Grover Norquist, a conservative activist who is part of
a coalition, Citizens for an Honest Count, that wants the census to
stick to traditional methods of counting people.
This excerpt from a 2001 PBS report
confirms my memory that the courts threw out stat sampling for the
constitutional reason cited above. But of course, book-cooking — err,
stat sampling — fans weren’t done (bolds are mine; paragraph breaks
added by me for readability):
In 1999, the Supreme Court had settled one part of the
issue, ruling that sampling adjusted figures could not be used to
apportion seats in Congress. But it left the door open for other uses, like redrawing congressional districts within a state and allocating federal funds.
Late last year, then President Clinton ordered that the Census
Bureau director, a nonpartisan civil servant, should decide whether to
adjust the 2000 census figures through sampling. But the Bush
administration reversed that order, saying the census… census
director’s boss, Commerce Secretary Donald Evans. Today the Census
Bureau in a written statement, they recommended to Evans that he not
use sampling to adjust the Bureau’s official figures for the purpose of
redistricting.
In a memo to Evans, acting Census Director William Barons, said the
Bureau “was unable, based on the data and other information currently
available, to conclude that the adjusted data are more accurate for use
in redistricting.”
It’s hard to predict without a lot of legal research, but Team Obama
may argue that its usurpation of the census-taking function makes it an
area of executive branch decision-making that is outside the purview of
court review. There may be other, more “creative” arguments in the
works. At a minimum, it would appear that the White House will attempt
to stretch the use of stat sampling into as many areas as it possibly
can.
There is an honest way to do this: Amend the Constitution to allow
it. That would force a debate on the appropriate uses of stat sampling;
but of course that’s way too much work for those who simply want to
grab power and see if anyone dares to do anything about it.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with stat sampling in certain
applications as long as those engaging in it use it validly and under
strict controls. But short of a constitutional amendment, any move
beyond “enumeration” for any purpose, despite what the courts said a
decade ago, looks obviously unconstitutional to me.
Which brings us to a variation of an old accounting joke — When
asked by his boss how much 2+2 is, the accountant replies with his own
question: “What do you want it to be?”
With the next Census, the question will be “How many people were
there in the US in 2010?” It appears that the answer will also be
another question, and a very long one, “Do you want the enumerated
count, or the apportionment count, or the welfare count, or the Food
Stamps count, or the …..?”
Boehner warns against politicizing Census
From Jmart:
House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) is joining other
Republicans in blasting the White House for plucking control of the
Census Bureau away from Commerce Secretary-designate Judd Gregg and
vesting it, perhaps, with Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.
Boehner, in a soon-to-be-released statement:
“I am disturbed by reports that control of the traditionally
nonpartisan Census Bureau is being stripped from the Commerce
Department and placed with the White House staff. This action appears
to be motivated by politics, rather than the interests of our country,
and the burden will be on the new administration to prove otherwise
during Senator Gregg’s confirmation hearings. The United States Census
should remain independent of politics; it should not be directed by
political operatives working out of the White House.”
