The American Debate: GOP rants on census are no surprise

By Dick Polman

Inquirer National Political Columnist

Posted on Sun, Feb. 22, 2009

After two successive electoral thrashings, after being told by the voters in 2006 and 2008 that they were unfit to govern, the minority Republicans have few potent weapons left in their arsenal. Whipping up hysteria is one of them.

Right now, for instance, they're going bonkers over the U.S. census, which is soon slated to begin its decennial mission of counting every American. The census might not strike you as being a particularly sexy issue, but inside the Washington hothouse, the census always bestirs the partisan juices. Despite President Obama's inaugural plea that politicians should put aside "childish things," there remains an overpowering urge to rant in the sandbox.

It all began this month, when the president, still pursuing his post-partisan dream, agreed to tap Sen. Judd Gregg (R., N.H.) for the job of commerce secretary. Big mistake. Whoever heads the Commerce Department also oversees the Census Bureau, and the liberal minority groups - recalling that Gregg once tried to cut the census budget, and suspecting that Gregg might prefer to undercount minorities - strongly protested his ascendance.

Those protests prompted the White House to issue a statement promising that Gregg's census director would "work closely with White House senior management." And that's the line that has sent the Republicans, and their messengers, into fits of apoplexy. Gregg has since withdrawn his name, but the emotions persist. On Fox News, Sean Hannity has been inveighing against "the biggest White House power grab ever," which is quite the priceless remark, given the recent Bush-Cheney "unitary executive" assaults on the U.S. Constitution.

GOP headquarters insists that Obama's "Chicago-style" "hijacking" of the census is "unprecedented," and that outraged donors should send money to fight it. A prominent religious-right group, the Family Research Council, insists that even "the liberal San Francisco Chronicle" is outraged. It quotes the paper as warning that Obama may well "destroy the integrity of one of the U.S. government's most trusted institutions" - although, as I discovered during my fact-checking, the group actually plucked that line from a letter to the editor.

Hyperbole aside, it's not surprising that the census is a flash point. Numbers are power. The population count determines who will most benefit from billions in federal aid, and where it will go; it determines which states will gain congressional seats and which states will lose. Both parties have a huge stake in the census. In the broadest terms, Democrats figure to gain clout if minorities and immigrants are overcounted; Republicans gain if these folks are undercounted.

Rep. John A. Boehner of Ohio, the GOP House leader, intones that the census "should remain independent of politics," but the reality is that the census has been hotly political since the dawn of the republic. A scholar once said that "trying to rid the census of politics is like trying to rid horse racing of competition." Current GOP rhetoric notwithstanding, presidents have always shown an abiding interest.

The very first presidential veto, exercised by George Washington, was about the very first census. He and a close White House adviser, fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson, decided that the census-related formula for congressional seats was too favorable to the Northern states, so they nixed the formula.

By today's rhetorical standards, that veto was a Virginia-style "power grab." And it was surely a "power grab" in 1970, when Republican Richard Nixon - who, at the time, was making a play for future Hispanic votes - ordered the Census Bureau at the 11th hour to add a new survey question about Hispanics.

Will Obama and his team show an interest in the 2010 census? Absolutely. Will they indeed appoint a new census director to fill the currently vacant job? That's how it works. But will that director become a White House lackey, skewing the numbers as part of an Obama conspiracy to craft a permanent majority? Only in the GOP's most fervent dreams. The census will stay within Commerce, and the same congressional oversight committees will oversee it, as always.

Granted, Democrats have certainly sought ways to maximize the minority count. Ten years ago, mindful that the 1990 census had missed eight million people, most of whom were underprivileged, Democrats suggested combining the results of the traditional "head count" with statistical sampling (a process similar to public opinion polls), in order to hike the tally of those minorities and immigrants who had ignored or eluded census inquiries. But Republicans had a solid response - the Constitution requires "actual enumeration" - and the Supreme Court nixed the idea anyway.

That was a big win for the Republicans, but clearly there's something about the census that drives them batty. In 2000, top GOP senators shrieked that certain questions on the census form constituted a government invasion of privacy; for instance, they ridiculed the inquiry about whether Americans had "complete plumbing facilities," including "a flush toilet." It turned out that the question had been asked in every census since 1940.

And once George W. Bush took over . . . well, it won't shock you to learn that, for the last eight years, the Census Bureau has been a mess. Each of the top three jobs turned over three times; none of those officials had any national census-taking experience; and preparations for the 2010 census were chronically underfinanced.

No wonder Obama has an abiding interest in the census; it's yet another fine mess that he is compelled to clean up. The current rants on the right are the least of his problems.