Good.
The Census Bureau will miss a year-end deadline for handing in numbers used for divvying up congressional seats, a delay that could undermine President Donald Trump’s efforts to exclude people in the country illegally from the count if the figures aren’t submitted before President-elect Joe Biden takes office.
The Census Bureau plans to deliver a population count of each state in early 2021, as close to the missed deadline as possible, the statistical agency said in a statement late Wednesday.
“As issues that could affect the accuracy of the data are detected, they are corrected,” the statement said. “The schedule for reporting this data is not static. Projected dates are fluid.”
It will be the first time that the Dec. 31 target date is missed since the deadline was implemented more than four decades ago by Congress.
Internal documents obtained earlier this month by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform show that Census Bureau officials don’t expect the apportionment numbers to be ready until days after Biden is inaugurated on Jan. 20.
Once in office, Biden could rescind Trump’s presidential memorandum directing the Census Bureau to exclude people in the country illegally from numbers used for divvying up congressional seats among the states. An influential GOP adviser had advocated excluding them from the apportionment process in order to favor Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.
“The delay suggests that the census bureau needs more time to ensure the accuracy of census numbers for all states,” said Terri Ann Lowenthal, a former congressional staffer who specializes in census issues.
[…]
Former Census Bureau director John Thompson said the quality of the data is “the overarching issue” facing the Census Bureau.
“If these are not addressed, then it is very possible that stakeholders including the Congress may not accept the results for various purposes including apportionment,” said Thompson, who oversaw 2020 census preparation as the agency’s leader during the Obama administration.
He said in an email that missing the Dec. 31 target date “means that the Census Bureau is choosing to remove known errors from the 2020 Census instead of meeting the legal deadline.”
See here and here for some background. It’s one less way for Trump to screw things up beyond his own administration’s reign, and we should all be happy for it. There’s also a bill in the Senate to extend the deadline for Census results by four months, which the Census Bureau had asked for back in April but which got sidelined by (among other things) the usual Trump indifference. I presume that will have a much better chance of passing if the Dem candidates can win in Georgia, but we’ll see.
The Constitution says “counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed.” The Framers knew how to say “citizens” if that’s what they meant – they did when laying out the qualifications to be President.
Stopping the intentional exclusion of some people from the count based on citizenship or lack thereof sounds an awful lot like “ensuring the accuracy of census numbers for all states.”