FreedomWorks

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1. It Would Put the Obama Administration and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel in the Driver’s Seat for Congressional Redistricting. The U.S. Census forms the basis for congressional redistricting. President Obama’s efforts to bring oversight of this process inside the White House and under the control of top Administration officials such as Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel open the census up to significant political corruption. Running the operation from inside the White House means the prevailing political party would control the formula by which the lines for every single congressional district are drawn!

2. It Threatens the Integrity of the Electoral College which Selects the President of the United States. The census also determines the makeup of the Electoral College which selects each U.S. President. Once again, by putting the White House in control, Obama could perpetuate the Democrat party’s hold on political power.

3. It Would Impose Unnecessary Bureaucratic Red-Tape that Could Lead to Inaccurate Results. The pure science of statistics should be what drives the census process. However, Obama’s move to inject politics will set-up a scenario where both the U.S. Commerce Department and the White House have overlapping responsibility. Experts like Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, believe that this will create confusion which could ultimately threaten the accuracy of census results.

4. It Would Subject the Distribution of Federal Funds to the Political Whims of the White House. Census data is also used to determine the allocation of federal resources with $300 billion distributed each year based on this data. This makes Obama’s power play even more significant. Billions in taxpayer dollars would be immediately exposed to the waste, fraud, and outright abuse of the liberal political machine. Pet community organizations like ACORN, the NAACP, or the National Council of La Raza could reap the windfall of manipulated federal funds.

5. There is Bi-partisan Opposition to the Obama Census Grab to Include 7 Former Census Directors. Conservatives have certainly been complaining about Obama’s proposed census grab, but they aren’t the only ones. A bill sponsored by Democrat Representative Carolyn Maloney (D, NY-14) and cosponsored by fellow Democrat Reps. William Clay (D, MO-1), Michael Honda (D, CA-15), Charles Gonzalez (D, TX-20), and Henry Waxman (D, CA-30) would seek to make the Census Bureau its own independent agency, cutting the White House out of the loop. Also, seven former directors of the U.S. Census (to include those serving under President’s Nixon and Reagan, but also Carter and Clinton) recently signed a letter in support of this very same approach, citing that “it is vitally important that the American public have confidence that the census results have been produced by an independent, non-partisan, apolitical, and scientific Census Bureau.”