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The Census for Dummies (Including the US Department of Justice)

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“Uncertainly is swirling over whether the Census Bureau will be able to get an accurate population count for the 2020 census,” The Hill reports.  The Department of Justice wants the bureau to ask respondents about their citizenship status, which could result in people avoiding the census altogether.

There’s a simple solution to the “problem,” and that is for the Census Bureau to slim its questionnaire down to the only question it can legally ask:

“How many people live here?”

The authority for the decennial federal census is found in Article I, Section 2 of the US Constitution:

“Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers …. The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.”

While the Constitution specifies citizenship requirements for serving in Congress, it makes no such distinction when it comes to the “enumeration” — the census.

The purpose of the census is to count noses, period, end of story.

Not what citizenship the noses hold.

Not what color the noses are.

Not what direction the noses are pointed in for purposes of prayer.

Not what language the mouth beneath the nose speaks.

Not whether the nose in question is attached to a male, female, transgender, gay, straight, bisexual, or differently abled body.

Number of noses. That’s it. That’s all.

Anything else, and anything done at any other time, such as the “American Community Survey” done between legitimate census periods, exceeds the Census Bureau’s constitutional brief. Which means, per the 10th Amendment, that it is unconstitutional. And, therefore, illegal.

Yes, US courts have held otherwise. Those same courts also held that people of color had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect” (Dred Scott v. Sanford) and then later that “equal but separate” treatment under law sufficiently respected those newly discovered rights (Plessy v. Ferguson), and still later that separate was inherently unequal (Brown v. Board of Education).

No amount of jiggery-pokery from the bench can obscure the plain meaning and obvious intent of Article I, Section 2. The Census Bureau shouldn’t be asking, nor should anyone consider himself or herself under any obligation whatsoever to answer, anything more or other  than:

“How many people live here?”

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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The Nunes Memo Only Partially “Vindicates” Trump, But it Fully Indicts the FBI and the FISA Court

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Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey (left), alongside President Barack Obama (center) and outgoing FBI Director Robert Mueller (right) at Comey’s nomination to become the Seventh Director of the FBI (Source: Wikipedia).
 

On February 2, US president Donald Trump approved public release of a memo from the US House Intelligence Committee concerning FBI malfeasance  in its applications for warrants to surveil Carter Page, a former member of his campaign team.

The following day, Trump triumphantly tweeted that the memo “totally vindicates” him in the ongoing “Russiagate” probe. It doesn’t really do that — proving a negative is always difficult — but it does add a great deal of credibility to his charge that the probe is a politically driven witch hunt rather than a serious criminal investigation.

According to the memo, the FBI based the probable cause claim in its multiple surveillance applications  to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge on two pieces of “evidence”:

1) A “minimally corroborated” (the FBI’s own words) dossier of political opposition research on Donald Trump, compiled by a British former spy in the pay of Trump’s political opponents; and

2) A Yahoo! News article based — although the FBI denied it — on leaks from that same foreign operative.

The memo also claims that at no point did the FBI apprise the judge of the political origins or “minimal corroboration” of the memo.

If these claims are true, then what happened was the equivalent of  crazy Uncle J. Edgar going before a judge and using a picture of me with a Frisbee [TM] in the air behind me, taken by my angry ex-wife, as probable cause to believe that I’m from Mars, then asking for a warrant to search my garage for flying saucers.

As you may recall, this is the same FBI which (and the same FBI director who) amassed mountains of evidence that Trump’s opponent in the 2016 presidential election had committed multiple felonies in her grossly negligent handling of classified information as Secretary of State, yet recommended against prosecuting her because, well, she’s Hillary Clinton.

And as you may also recall, this is the same FISA court that, between 1979 and 2013 approved 35,434 warrant requests and denied 12.

How many of those 35,434 requests were backed by evidence no more substantial than that described in the Nunes memo?

How much more dumb and evidenceless did those 12 denied requests have to be to not get a pass?

And why did the same Republican Congress which just released this memo recently vote to renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, giving even more expansive powers to organizations which have clearly used those powers abusively and without regard to even minimal standards of evidence?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Did Trump and/or his campaign team “collude” with the Russian government to manipulate the 2016 presidential election? I don’t know. But I do know that disguising a circus as an investigation isn’t likely  to shed real light on the matter.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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#ReleaseTheMemo — And Then Some

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On January 29, the US House Intelligence Committee voted to publicly release a four-page memo on the “Russiagate” inquiry, authored by committee chair Devin Nunes (R-CA).  Republican sources tell The Hill  that the memo alleges “‘shocking’ surveillance abuses” by the Department of Justice. By the time you read this, we’ll  all know much of the memo’s contents, as President Trump has reportedly signed off on the decision to release it with redactions.

While the memo may be a bombshell, whats more interesting is the rigmarole surrounding its release and the non-release of a competing memo from the committee’s Democratic minority.

We live in an age of unparalleled transparency, thanks to heroes and martyrs like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange. It’s getting harder and harder for governments (and political parties and individual politicians) to keep secrets. That’s a good thing. The more we know, the more effectively we can attempt to hold the political class  ever so slightly accountable.

Yet  the jokers in Congress continue to arrogantly assume that they’re entitled to hide what they’re up to from the rest of us whenever they decide we don’t need to know.

On the campaign trail, they tell us that we’re their employers and that they’re just humble “public servants.” But once elected, they go to work behind closed doors and hide their hearings, their discussions, their memos and their other work product from us at will.

What kind of employee gets to tell the boss “you don’t need to know what I’m up to?” In the private sector, the kind of employee who quickly finds himself look for another job, that’s what kind.

The trend of legislative and executive activity in the 21st century has, thus far, been in the opposite direction. These days, it’s all about politicians giving themselves more power to pry into our private lives while hiding their own affairs from us  any time someone says the words “national security.” The Fourth Amendment has become a shadow of its former self as the surveillance and national security states grow like Topsy with Congress as their rubber stamp.

It’s time to return to a strong presumption that congressional hearings and work product are by their nature in the public domain and must be preserved and made available for “the bosses” to view, with felony penalties for bad behavior. All the legitimate secrets in Washington would fit in a single file cabinet.

Congress won’t be easily persuaded to impose such restraint on itself. But every member of the US House of Representatives and 1/3 of the Senate is up for re-election  or replacement this November. Maybe it’s time to have a word your “employees” about what you expect from them.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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