Originally published at: How Republicans Used the Pandemic to Try to Upend Census Residency Rules - TPM – Talking Points Memo
The census makes politics. Representatives are allocated to states based on the count of the population, and states redistrict their maps accordingly. Thus, it’s perhaps not surprising that different partisan forces work behind the scenes to make census data in their own image. In advance of the 2030 Census, the Trump Administration has recently announced…
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If the GOP had is way only white men who are property owners would be able to vote, you know as the Founding Fathers intended.
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Trump and his GOP have no guard rails, just like the fascists of old (not so old…).
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God this is complicated. I mean in the Bible Joseph had to go back to his hometown to be counted in the census Caesar Augustus…
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In the beginning a few states had property ownership as a voting requirement. Needless to say a penis was also necessary.
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But no Catholics - or at least, only 1 in 55.
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Not to state the obvious, but if a MAGA traitor is “elected” president in 2028, the census will no longer be accurate and used instead for a partisan agenda. If a Democrat is elected, the damage can be repaired.
It’s as simple as that.
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I’m a demographer who uses, and relies on, census data. Even ignoring the political redistricting issue (which is hard to ignore) an important, perhaps key, reason not to tamper with definitions and procedures without considerable thought is because we look at changes between censuses, not just in raw counts but in the characteristics of the people being counted. At the simplest level, we look at the counts of people to get the denominators for birth and death rates by location; and we use their ages to get fertility and death rates by age and location. The GOP currently appears to think that the only thing the census is used for is redistricting. It’s not.
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Well, it’s the only thing the GOP cares about, power.
They really don’t care about much else.
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English usage pointer: Congress does not “abscond” with its oversight duties, it abandons them or cedes them to the White House. Abscond, of course, means to take and get away with something that does not belong to you.
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Republicans have for decades tried to legislate at the state level that students cannot vote in their college towns, when it is obviously a choice. They oppose liberal politics in college towns and seek to reduce everything to the red-state lowest level.
In those days, of course, there were no laws giving some official the right to inspect the genitals of prominent members of the community, or even of voters in general, for gender conformity.