The Trump administration’s plan to make people disappearPosted in Articles, Census/Demographics, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2018-03-31 02:06Z by Steven |
The Trump administration’s plan to make people disappear
The Washington Post
2018-03-30
Karen Tumulty, Columnist
 2010 Census forms. (Ross D. Franklin/AP) |
As long as there has been a census, there have been complaints about how it was conducted.
Ours is believed to have been the first country to have required that its entire population be counted on a regular basis. The Constitution stipulated that there be an “actual enumeration” of all U.S. residents within three years of Congress’s first meeting and every 10 years thereafter.
But when the 1790 population tally came in at a disappointingly low 3.9 million residents, skeptics — including President George Washington and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson — insisted that the initial effort surely must have missed 1 million or more people. The new nation’s wounded pride notwithstanding, later surveys suggested that the first count was pretty much on the mark.
Nor has the seemingly objective exercise of counting people ever been immune to politics. The census helps determine how more than $675 billion in federal funds will be allocated annually and how congressional district lines will be redrawn to ensure that voters are equally represented. After the 1920 Census showed a massive movement from farms to cities, the rural lawmakers who dominated things at the time decided to ignore it entirely and skipped reapportionment that decade.
The Trump administration now proposes to corrupt the process in a different way: by requiring every household to report the citizenship status of its members…
Read the entire article here.