Congressional
Republicans and their right-wing allies are denouncing the Obama administration for
"playing politics" with the 2010
Census. Sen. Judd
Gregg even obliquely hinted that it might have been a factor in
his withdrawal of his nomination as secretary of Commerce.
I
have no idea whether or not it is true that the president and the Democrats are
considering amending the formula for calculating the distribution of the nation's
population this time around. But I certainly hope so.
And
as for "playing politics" with the issue, the GOP's complaints are
fraught with hypocrisy. After all, one of the first acts of the Bush
administration when it took over the White House in 2000 was to rescind the
Clinton administration's plan to adopt a sampling technique in order to correct
widely recognized flaws in the decennial enumeration of the population. I do
not recall any Republican complaints at the time that the White House was "playing
politics" with the census.
Almost all demographers agree the census
count is flawed. Because of overcrowding, mobility and other factors in urban
areas where much of the nation's non-white population resides, approximately
one of every 20 African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans are missed by the
census counters, compared with one in 100 of non-Hispanic whites.
In
order to compensate for the differential, the Census Bureau had decided toward
the end of the Clinton administration to implement certain statistical
techniques in order to more accurately enumerate the population and geographic
distribution. The basic technique was to blanket sample districts to get a more
statistically accurate nose count, which was not possible by normal counting
procedures. The differential between the two counts was then to be utilized to
determine the undercount arrived at in various demographic areas in order to
adjust the final count.
Since
legislative districting is governed by population numbers, the impact of the undercount
of racial minorities is obvious. Without adjustment, inner-city residents get
short-changed. To put it another way, some 5 percent of the non-white
population is denied legislative representation.
The
undercount of racial minorities in the distribution of legislative seats has an
eerie resemblance to the three-fifths clause of the Constitution, which counted
slaves as three-fifths of a person in order to augment representation of the
slave states. But now, inner-city blacks are counted as 19/20ths of a person
and the effect is to dilute their representation.
Moreover,
inner-city areas get shortchanged in the distribution of federal funds tied to
population figures.
At
the time of the 1990 census, New York City sued in an effort to compel the first
Bush administration to adopt sampling techniques, claiming failure to do so led
to a violation of the principle of one-person, one-vote in the distribution of
legislative seats. But the Supreme Court ruled that the courts should defer to
the secretary of Commerce to make such a decision.
Hopefully,
that time has now arrived.
Frank Askin is Distinguished Professor of Law and Robert
Knowlton Scholar at Rutgers School of Law-Newark, and the founding director of
the law school's Constitutional Litigation Clinic.
