Anyone poking around in their family history quickly learns that one of the most important resources is the US Census. There, if you’re lucky, you can follow the trail of your people back through history, from the present to the first enumeration in 1790. Where they lived, who they married, when their children were born, the street on which they lived, and in some cases whether they owned slaves or their country of origin.
All of this data s not valuable just to genealogists but is crucial to governmental and private business decision-making. The census shows how the demographics of the country are changing, which places are growing, which shrinking, where new infrastructure, retail or housing construction will be needed, and highlights a thousand other problems or opportunities created by change.
The census is an essential feature of an organized, civilized state. The Bible tells us, appropriately enough in the Book of Numbers, that Moses conducted a census of the Israelites, the Romans counted the empire under Caesar Augustus, and William the Conquerer compiled the Domesday Book of the inhabitants of England in 1086.
Taking a census was the first power described by the Constitution in 1787. You could look it up in Article I, Section 2, Clause 3. There you will find the method prescribed for staffing the lower House: “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers.”
Fine and dandy. Big states, lots of members of the house, little states, fewer members. But how was Congress to discover how many people lived in each state in order to decide how many representatives they deserved? By conducting an “actual enumeration” every ten years. And three years later, in 1790, the first took place. There were 3,929,214 of us.
Today, there are somewhere around 323 million of us. The next count, the 24th, is scheduled to take place in 2020. It is vitally important that it be done correctly, thoroughly, professionally, impartially and on time. It decides not just who represents us in Congress, but how tax dollars are allocated for many federal programs, which places prosper and which are shortchanged.
For the count to go smoothly and miss no one, the Census Bureau must prepare years in advance. Yet, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Trump administration and the Republican Congress have dropped the ball. They have underfunded the ramp-up to the massive effort that will cost billions and employ thousands of temporary enumerators.
Due to lack of funds, the Bureau has already had to cancel parts of a test-run for 2020, and it is six months late in producing an economic report that is supposed to appear regularly. Is this neglect born of carelessness, anti-government malice of chicanery?
A clue may lie in the Trump administration’s floating of the name of Thomas Brunnell to head the Bureau, a post that requires Congressional approval. It quickly became apparent that Brunnell would face tough sledding, because he is both unqualified for the post and a partisan zealot likely to corrupt the count for political purposes.
You can find more on Brunnell in a “Politico” piece of Nov. 21, “Leading Trump Census P{ick Causes Alarm,” which includes the following facts. Brunnell is a Texas political science professor who has advised Republican administrations in several states on how to redraw districts to maximize seats for their party. In short, he is a gerrymander expert who wrote a book arguing that “competitive elections are bad for America.”
Whatever else you can say about Trump and the Rs, they can hardly be accused of hiding their intentions to twist the census process to achieve their own partisan ends. By proposing such a director for the Bureau they make their motives very clear. They also get high marks for perseverance.
Seeing that Brunnell was unlikely to be confirmed as Director, the administration decided to leave the top job at the Census Bureau empty. Instead they have decided to appoint a Deputy Director to run the operation, and in practice it is normally the Deputy who actually manages the census. And whose name leads the list for Deputy Director — Thomas Brunnell. And surprise, surprise, the Deputy Directorship does not require Congressional confirmation.
Almost always the Deputy Director is a career civil servant, not a political partisan, a person with long experience with the intricacies of the census, and credentials in statistical analysis. Brunnell has none of the above, suggesting he will serve not as a professional manager but as a partisan saboteur.
Once again, the Vandals seem intent on undermining the institutions of a civilized state and breaking what others have built. Instead of a fair and unbiased count, it is possible to produce results that will favor one party over another. This can be achieved by undercounting some demographic groups and fully counting others, or simply neglecting some hard to count communities.
If successful, such a miscount can skew the composition of the House beginning in 2022 for a decade and can make data relied on by government and business less reliable and useful until 2032.
And if the jiggering of the 2020 census works, and Republican hegemony in the House is locked in for a decade, the 2030 census may be conducted in an equally corrupt manner.
This is the way a great power declines, by a slow erosion of little seen, but essential institutions.