Trying To Avoid A Census Crisis

This CNN story tells us the following (and I also posted here)…

WASHINGTON (CNN) - A report that the Obama administration will name an advocate of statistical sampling as the next census director has set off a fusillade of Republican criticism even though that choice has not been formally announced.

The Associated Press reported Thursday afternoon that the White House intends to nominate University of Michigan Prof. Robert M. Groves as the census director. Groves worked for the Census Bureau during the last census in 1990, and recommended at that time that the national head count be statistically adjusted to compensate for a possible undercount of millions of Americans.

By the way, the two House Repugs caterwauling the loudest over this are Darrell Issa (apparently having grown bored with insisting on more transparency from Michelle Obama, as noted here) and Patrick McHenry (taking a break from endangering and harassing our military serving in Iraq, as noted here).

And call me just another filthy, unkempt liberal blogger, but let’s see now…if Groves ran the census for 1990, then the work for that would have taken place in the prior decade of the ‘80s, and I don’t recall any Democratic presidential administrations during that time.

Actually, I think the Repugs are concerned because the census (which I’m sure will be managed correctly now that Former President Highest Disapproval Rating In Gallup Poll History and his bunch are no longer in charge) is likely to reveal, and thus enshrine, information such as the following from this 2007 New York Times editorial, written before the Lehman failure last year, the moment the recession kicked in for good…

Sputtering under the weight of the credit crisis and the associated drop in the housing market, the economic expansion that started in 2001 looks like it might enter history books with the dubious distinction of being the only sustained expansion on record in which the incomes of typical American households never reached the peak of the previous cycle. It seems that ordinary working families are going to have to wait — at the very minimum — until the next cycle to make up the losses they suffered in this one. There’s no guarantee they will.

The gains against poverty last year were remarkably narrow. The poverty rate declined among the elderly, but it remained unchanged for people under 65. Analyzed by race, only Hispanics saw poverty decline on average while other groups experienced no gains.

The fortunes of middle-class, working Americans also appear less upbeat on closer consideration of the data. Indeed, earnings of men and women working full time actually fell more than 1 percent last year.

This suggests that when household incomes rose, it was because more members of the household went to work, not because anybody got a bigger paycheck. The median income of working-age households, those headed by somebody younger than 65, remained more than 2 percent lower than in 2001, the year of the recession.

Over all, the new data on incomes and poverty mesh consistently with the pattern of the last five years, in which the spoils of the nation’s economic growth have flowed almost exclusively to the wealthy and the extremely wealthy, leaving little for everybody else.

Also, I thought this post from a man named Morley Winograd, who was hired by then-VP Al Gore to oversee the 2000 census, made some interesting points; the Repugs favored a “straight enumeration” (which included tricks such as double-counting families with two homes or college students with two residences, who trended Republican) versus a “sample supplemented census” (noted in the CNN story, which used survey sampling techniques to validate not just the overall count but the individual demographic sub-groups that the census’s enumeration process would identify).

And as you may have guessed, the Repugs don’t like “sampling” because it might ensure a more accurate account of minorities who would tend to vote Democratic. In fact, they disliked it so much that…

Republicans sued the Census Bureau in federal court, demanding that only the actual count of residents as provided in the Constitution be used for any congressional redistricting by the states. The Federal Appeals court dismissed the Republican lawsuit as none of the Court’s business. Foreshadowing the outcome of Gore v. Bush in 2000, the Supreme Court surprisingly took up the case and overturned the Appeals court ruling. As a result, all subsequent redistricting efforts have used only the enumeration count from the 2000 census. On the other hand, formulas used to allocate federal funds based on population characteristics were unaffected by the ruling and could have used the sampling process, had it not met an untimely and unnecessary death.

As soon as George W. Bush was elected and the incredibly professional Director of the Census Bureau, Ken Prewitt, was removed from office, the Commerce Department’s new partisan Secretary, Donald Evans, determined that the sample that had been prepared over the strong objections of congressional Republicans was not usable.

Also…

When Newt Gingrich became speaker of the House, he decided, in his own paranoid way, that Bill Clinton and the Democrats would use their executive authority to produce a biased census whose over-count of minorities would shift, in his opinion, 24 House seats from the Republicans to the Democrats after the 2000 census. Of course, it was ludicrous to think such an outcome would occur, since legislative boundaries are drawn by the party in power in each state. Whatever numbers the census produces in our decennial exercise can be manipulated to produce any outcome each state’s ruling party desires, as U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay and his Texas Republican cronies proved a few years ago. Nevertheless, Gingrich was determined to use the Congressional appropriations process to undercut any attempt by the Democrats to overstate minority populations in the several states.

So as you can see, the census has been and will remain a big political football, thus generating much umbrage primarily from the party out of power for years to come (and by the way, here’s a clarification about Judd Gregg that gets snuck into the end of the CNN story – no end to the tricks of our dear corporate media cousins).

Update 4/5/09: I thought this was interesting.