Taking Leave of their Census
Right wingers are fucking idiots. With Erick Erickson, doubly-so:
This is crazy. What gives the Commerce Department the right to ask me how often I flush my toilet? Or about going to work? I’m not filling out this form. I dare them to try and come throw me in jail. I dare them to. Pull out my wife’s shotgun and see how that little ACS twerp likes being scared at the door. They’re not going on my property. They can’t do that. They don’t have the legal right, and yet they’re trying.
First of all, the census doesn’t ask you how often you flush your toilet or how often you go to work. That’s just standard winger paranoia.
But this notion that the government doesn’t “have the legal right” to make you fill out the census is just 100% WRONG:
The U.S. Constitution empowers the Congress to carry out the census in “such manner as they shall by Law direct” (Article I, Section 2). The Founders of our fledgling nation had a bold and ambitious plan to empower the people over their new government. The plan was to count every person living in the newly created United States of America, and to use that count to determine representation in the Congress.
For someone who seems to always be bringing up the Constitution, he sure is fucking ignorant of what’s actually IN the document.
So like the bunch of morons they are, the right wing has been telling their flock not to participate, warning of internment camps for conservatives, and other nonsense. And apparently, it’s working: in Wingnutistan Texas, participation rates are incredibly low. Northern Michigan, home to a substantial wingnut population, also has low rates. And so on.
Then, the right-wingers realized something (as usual, too late): because the census counts PEOPLE, it has ramifications for your POLITICAL REPRESENTATION, including redistricting. So a mad scramble to get right-wingers to participate ensued: Karl Rove, of all people, was trotted out to plead for conservative participation.
So now, having pretty much squandering their opportunity to participate in the census, the conservatives NOW say the census is deliberately skipping republican neighborhoods.
These people are nuts.
