February 19th 2009
Obama Not Backing Off Census Take-Over
T
he quietest scandal in Washington continues – Rahmbama’s outrageous effort to fold the 2010 U.S. Census into the White House. Inquiring minds in the mainly marginalized media – if there were any – would be asking what would be gained from such a move, but few are questioning the move because they know the answer: Rahmbama wants to turn the Census into crass Chicago ward politics for the long-term benefit of the Dems.
Former Census Director Bruce Chapman continues to update the situation at Discovery Blog, and you can tell he’s getting nervous. After relaying the upcoming pressure points – hearings on the nominees for Commerce Sec. #3, Deputy Sec. and Census Director – Chapman pleads:
Meanwhile, the danger for Republicans is that they merely will vent and gesture when the confirmation and oversight hearings come. If they don’t prepare themselves they are likely to be rendered ineffectual in the end. To put it bluntly, the Senate and House staffs need to be doing their homework now. (Emphasis in original)
Chapman is a believer in the science of statistics and believes it should be applied purely to the Census, without the very real threat of political influence that could come from over-sampling and modeling. He laments the silence of other scientists on the controversy:
Liberal Democrats and their allies in the media and the sciences have been lamentably quiet about this subject since it surfaced two weeks ago. There hasn’t been a peep out of the National Academy of Sciences that I have heard. (I’ll be happy to be shown that there has been one if I have missed it.) Some of these folks have strong opinions–which they present as facts–on other matters bearing on science policy, but they apparently have trouble standing up for the scientific discipline of statistics when it is being given a political arm-twist.
The NY Times finally got around to covering the story today, presenting it as all rather ho-hum, despite a pretty clear statement of the politics at play:
While most Americans do not think much about the census, it looms large in the lives of the nation’s political leaders, with the next decennial nose-count due next year. The constitutionally mandated “enumeration” determines how many seats each state gets in the House of Representatives, and helps to determine where the district lines are drawn within each state. It will also shift billions upon billions of federal dollars over the next decade from some parts of the country to others because of population-driven financing formulas.
For years, the story points out, Dems have been trying to force the Census away from actual counts, fearing that the poor and minority populations are under-counted. The Supreme Court ruled against their position 5-4 in 1999, saying that under the current law, the Census cannot use sampling techniques to reapportion House seats from one state to another.
Karl Rove points out that policy can do that, anyway, citing the Clinton-run 2000 Census when missionary counts from overseas were not ascribed to their states, which made a difference in the assignment of House seats in North Carolina and Utah.
Still, the Census could use modeling to draw district lines within states and to determine which districts get more money.
Chapman argues that the problems with undersampling the poor are overstated, thanks to hard work by the science-driven statisticians at the Bureau, and recommends that Congress consider making it a separate bureau, away from the influence of both the Sec. of Commerce and the White House.
Fat chance Rahmbama will consider that option.
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