Catastrophe - Dick Morris [55]
For years, Democrats have watched in anguish as their congressional power eroded because people left the Democratic Northeast to flock to Republican states in the South and the West. This massive shift in national population, of course, has created a transfer of House seats, and therefore of electoral votes to the new states where these folks settled. (The Electoral College vote of each state is the sum of its House and Senate delegations.)
In a bid to arrest the decline, Democrats have long argued that census counts are false because the poor, immigrants, and inner-city residents are not fully counted. Part of the blame falls on the poor themselves, who, it is said, often don’t cooperate with visits from census takers out of fear of the police or immigration authorities. Others blame high crime in urban areas, claiming that census takers are reluctant to go into these areas and residents are shy about opening their doors to strangers.
So the Democrats have long sought to use statistical sampling procedures to ramp up the counts of inner-city populations. Republicans have rejected their proposals, and the Supreme Court has ruled against some of their sampling plans in the past. (Since the census is specifically mandated in the Constitution, the Court has ample jurisdiction.)
The census of 2010, which will be the first conducted by a Democratic administration in thirty years, will not only determine the distribution of House seats at the federal level, it will also shape the distribution of state legislative seats throughout the nation. And these are especially important, since it will be the state legislatures, elected under new lines based on the new census, that will draw the legislative districts for the federal House of Representatives, largely determining its partisan balance.
A good census could give either party a decade of political power.
For example, under the Clinton administration, census takers refused to count Mormon missionaries who live permanently in Utah but serve overseas. As a result, Republican Utah lost a fourth congressional seat. (Under proposals to give the District of Columbia a vote in the House—undoubtedly a Democrat—Utah would get its extra seat, almost certain to be Republican.)
Everyone expects Obama to try to manipulate the census to increase Democratic representation. But the administration showed its hand prematurely when the president nominated New Hampshire Republican Senator Judd Gregg to be his secretary of commerce. Gregg withdrew his name when he realized that he couldn’t let himself become a bipartisan fig leaf to camouflage Obama’s ultra-left program.
Before Gregg pulled out, though, minority groups around the nation protested his selection. Why? Because the Census Bureau is part of the Department of Commerce. The Georgia talk-show host Martha Zoller, writing in Human Events, describes how even “before the ink was dry on the announcement of Sen. Judd Gregg as Commerce Secretary, the Congressional Black Caucus and Latino groups were complaining that a Republican could not be in control of the census.”186
Gregg, who is opposed to sampling, had voted against funding increases for the Census Bureau. As chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee, which oversees the Commerce Department, Gregg had opposed a 1999 Clinton administration request for emergency funds for the 2000 census; in 1995, he had voted to abolish the Department of Commerce.187
These past positions made liberals suspect that Gregg couldn’t be counted on to cook the books and give them a biased census. So the Obama administration let it be known that its chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, would be in charge of the census and would have the power of oversight. The appointment of Emanuel—the former head of the House Democratic campaign committee—to oversee the census signaled Obama’s intention to do all he can to manipulate the figures to give the Democrats a good, even if inaccurate, count.
Larry Sabato,