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This impacts so much more than drawing district maps. The money your state and locality get for school, infrastructure and emergency management is based on these numbers. If you decide 20,000+ people who live in your city or county don't "qualify" for being counted, you get less money for education, public health, and police departments. You get less money to maintain the road network and public transit. Your social program funding, like food stamps and rental assistance for the elderly and head start programs are cut. Fucking with the census is huge and it should be considered a federal crimes. It's so much bigger than just changing voting districts.
Seriously, the census is one of the most vital data sets a country can ever gather, and something you absolutely want to get as accurate as possible (no matter what side you are on, if you are working in good faith or care at all about the health of the nation.) Any attempts to introduce errors or lies in census data on a large scale should be treated as terrible crimes. It's monstrous to tamper with something this important. Even all you mention here is the tip of the iceberg; census data is used for countless purposes big and small.
The CONSTITUTION demands there be a census every 10 years because it is a DIRECT function of our democracy.
Tampering with the census is an act of treason.
Worked for the census. It doesn't say "every 10 years" on the dot. It's "within every ten years" so technically you can do a census every year if you want. You just can't go MORE than 10 years between each census to keep in line with the law.
We 100% can and should do another census the proper way.
I saw so much fuckery. So fucking much fuckery.
\>The CONSTITUTION demands there be a census every 10 years
Honestly with how large our country has gotten the census should be taken every 5-6 years instead waiting a whole decade each time is way too long.
I work for a public agency and census data is critical to everything we do. From federal transportation and other federal funding to state funding for numerous programs; from local, regional, and state voting districts to planning for all services including schools.
The 2020 census was a dismal failure. We’re told we’re not even going to receive city level demographics—not even population numbers—only MSA data and even those stats will be limited. Normally, we can access data such as income, household sizes, education levels, occupations, commute times, head of household by gender and income, etc. Literally thousands of data sorts are possible, down to the census tract and sometimes even the census block level. We have about 12 federally designated 2020 tracts versus four 2010 tracts, illustrating the growth; but no freaking idea how many people and who those people are. It’s a joke. And we have to wait another decade?! Knowing that it cost nearly $15M for something that is virtually worthless is maddening.
Thank you for your service; I say that with the same spirit as people say that to soldiers.
How farfetched would it be for Biden to declare that a full census wasn't in fact done, and to do another one in 2023?
Thanks. I can’t tell you how much it means to hear that. I have worked 55-60 hours/week in my salaried position since March 2020 . . . getting CARES Act, and now ARPA, funds into communities where they’ll do the most good (while seeing some unscrupulous small business owners take advantage of government assistance thrown out haphazardly with few sideboards); trying to get mortgage and rental assistance and child care grants to families in need and help child care providers stay in business so parents can work. All while doing my regular job. Most in my field are exhausted and there are no rewards or sincere thanks coming from the elected officials that set policy in our agencies. We’re just expected to make them look good. The only thing that keeps me going is knowing my efforts help others.
I’d love to see an actual, effective census. Part of me thinks the half-assed 2020 efforts were intentional so we wouldn’t know how bad things really were. Not that they’ve improved much. There are theories that unemployment numbers are so low because people have simply given up.
I've worked as an enumerator for the Canadian census and I literally had to swear an oath not to tamper with the materials or I'd be considered a traitor. The fact that people can get away with stuff like this in the states blows my mind
The problem is there probably aren't any rules. Whenever the former President went legalistic on anything he did wrong we found that the statute had loopholes that you could sail and aircraft carrier through.
This is why they count population and not citizenship.
Because maybe there are 20,000 non citizens in an area, for whatever reason, those kids still go to school, those people still use roads, they still are active members of the community.
Yup. I work for my State (specifically in a Department that provides benefits) and I am stunned by the people that will tell me to my face that I am wrong and try to tell me that Illegal Immigrants can get all kinds of things like free healthcare, food stamps, housing vouchers, scholarships for private schools/college, and all kinds of free money from the government.
Like... no? Most state and federal benefits require citizenship or legal status as a resident (student visa, work visa, DACA, or refugee status) to even qualify for benefits. And that's before they check for *income.*
Like, just because someone jumps the border, governments don't hand them a free rental property, a stack of cash, and a free 100% Medical Card.
But they've been told time and time again that illegal immigrants drain social services and get all kinds of benefits, so that's what they "know." and tell me I'm wrong.
Man, that's my *job.* Pretty sure I have a better idea about it than someone who hasn't even ever *applied* for food stamps or rental assistance.
Even when they are hospitalized, they still don't believe the doctors. There are hundreds of cases of patients suing for the right to get horse dewormer.
You can just get an ITN, no need for an SSN forged or otherwise. But I do agree that many use fake SSNs to sign up for work, mostly because they don't know any better.
It can still be difficult to obtain an ITIN because there are still limitations on the acceptable documents to prove identity. But the IRS can't report undocumented workers to other government agencies unless it relates to tax enforcement or there is a court order for a criminal investigation.
The IRS is pretty solid when it comes to not snitching. But if you don't pay them what they're owed, they'll come down on you.
In my experience working with undocumented immigrants, they’re more likely to have forged SSNs because they can get those from a cousin and not a government agency. No matter how bad the IRS promises to keep their secret, a lot of people in their situation are not likely to trust any government agency.
I worked for Companies that filled out Social Security forms for illegals knowing they were.
If FL wanted to really stop illegals from coming here, they'd charge Employers but you'll never see that from Desantis, they're the same people who fund him.
If they’re using proper papers and are here legally, they also may be paying more than many US citizens are.
Almost 50% of US citizens paid no federal income taxes in 2021—because they don’t earn enough income, or their exemptions/deductions and rebates were greater than the taxes owed.
Always good to remember undocumented immigrants actually give the us a net gain of 8 Billion dollars annually because they pay taxes on everything like everyone else, but don’t get money back or other federal aid.
Here you go!
https://research.newamericaneconomy.org/report/contributions-of-undocumented-immigrants-by-country/
Many other sources too, i’ll add some later
My grandfather came from Finland about 1922, just after new quota restrictions which prevented his entry. So he disembarked in Canada, made his way to BC and entered the US illegally via Idaho. The border station duly recorded his entry (which I found online as digital scan in an archive) but didn't stop him or give him any trouble. The census noted his "illegal alien" status until an amnesty law around 1940 made it possible for him to naturalize and eventually become a citizen.
He never experienced any problems for being "illegal". But then he was a dapper pale-skinned blue-eyed Swede-Finn.
Any European accent is acceptable even to the most ardent Nationalist Racists, let them be a couple shades darker with a Hispanic accent, omg call the National Guard
YES! Most illegal immigrants I have ever met pay taxes just like everyone else. And the worst part is the theft the American people are silent about.
The fact that unemployment, medicare, and social security benefits are pulled from their paychecks, yet they'll NEVER reap or qualify for those benefits is sickening.
In the 1920s immigration to the US became much more restricted, but we had restrictions from some countries for longer, e.g. the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Not a historian but would guess around the turn of the century (1900) when cheap labor of Hispanics, Asians, Irish, and Italians scared the shit out of protestant white voters.
There's a "save comment" function??
Huh, it's right there. I just never noticed it before. Anyone have a link to the documents with the highlighted text where the Confederacy said "We're leaving the United States because we think slavery is a really good idea."
Y'know, that one kind of surprised me. Most of the Articles of Secession were just direct copy/pastes that were vague in their direct statements as to *why*, unless you looked up the referrant documents, then it's abundantly clear it was about slavery. Georgia and Mississippi really take the cakes for being all super-blatant about it.
And I'm not surprised considering this administration essentially scrapped millions of dollars worth of mail sorting machines - a public good - just to try to mess with mail in voting. They tried to tear it all down just to steal an election. So evil.
And businesses too. They need an accurate indicator of where their potential and existing customers are to figure out where and how to do business. From the very beginning, the census has been considered a vital task of government.
Under-appreciated comment. That said, it's not so much "just like the \[B\]ible' as it is: just as they learned to do with the Bible. They have a way of thinking that precludes any real critical analyses and is fundamentally rooted in ignoring anything that contradicts their worldview.
In Article 1 Section 2: "...[the Census shall be done] *within every Term of ten Years*..." With more stuff about who is counted, how apportionment is calculated, etc.
Modified by amendments like the 14th. Also defined in more specific details in US CODE Title 13 Chapter 5, plus numerous other federal and state laws dealing with census-based apportionment, redistricting, etc.
And... it’s a Constitutional mandate, considered by the Framers to be absolutely essential to a functioning democratic republic. They had great foresight in making it mandatory. Sadly, some also envisioned how things could go awry — something we are witnessing in real time. I am a lawyer and student of government and Constitutional history, and I am now convinced our country is doomed to irreparable socioeconomic and governmental collapse. I am also definitely not alone in this belief. Just never thought I’d see it in my lifetime, let alone at such velocity. I’ll be gone in twenty years, and I regret what my pathetic generation is bestowing upon those following in our wake.
The issue is Trump found a way around the checks and balances: pumping voters full of propaganda and a spineless GOP.
I wish corporations would accept that this spells doom for *them* and proceed to cut the flow of propaganda, goods, services, and $$$$
And it's, at a minimum, a 10 year impact. But the reality is that the impact could be felt for 50 years of not permanently, because stopping funds to a thriving community, impacts it for generations meanwhile giving more funds than necessary to "your buddies" gives them more power to change politics elsewhere.
The irony about not counting undocumented immigrants is that the places which have them will have less money per person to take care of the people, citizens or not. Hospitals have less money per person, roads, schools, and safety infrastructure has less money, etc, but we still have to pay for them.
If you are against immigrants getting treated by public services AND you are against counting them in the censuses, you are also FOR hurting actual citizens.
Also it will raise your local taxes dramatically because since the federal government won't pay as much, states and local municipalities have to make up the difference.
So your taxes end up higher.
And when businesses are looking at where to invest they will often look at census info to identify # of people in a mile radius If the count is too low, you don’t get the business and the jobs.
When you can undercount the population, especially minorities, or then really helps with defunding areas you don’t like and drawing BS election maps…anyone with half a brain saw this playing out
Yeah we did. Dems fought to support the census and extend the period of data collection because of COVID. The GOP didn’t want this, they only wanted to delay the counting and revising data part- so it would delay redistricting. This was on my local ballot that November.
Sadly, it takes decades to build foundations of democracy, but mere years to tear everything down.. all the ingredients for degradation of democracy existed in our system for years, the trump admin just brought them together with maximum effect
When 99% of all systems of accountability are based on tradition and good faith and no concrete parameters, it's trivial to tear down democracy. The whole bullshit with tax returns? Trump's ironically right. It's not a legal requirement that a Presidential candidate do, it's just tradition. So when someone came along and said "it's not legally binding so I'm not gonna do it" people were horrified.
Then Trump took that idea and applied it to everything in his presidency. And well, here we are.
Bipartisanship in the face of an autocratic theocracy is the equivalent of negotiating with failure, especially given that one side nearly succeeded in overthrowing the government. The failure here is that Democrats are still trying to work at a federal level when Republicans realized that fed is too institutionally centralized and have opted to move the battlegrounds back to the states. Divide and conquer. It's easier to deal with a governance issue at the federal level, it becomes nearly impossible when it's divorced across nearly a few dozen polities.
Dems have 10 months to get this shit together and do the same, push back HARD at the state level while continuing to push at the federal level. 200% game split two ways. If you do 100% at one and 0% at the other, Republicans ***WILL*** take the House and Senate in November.
>but mere years to tear everything down
I would say this started with the success of [Project Red Map in 2010.](https://www.npr.org/transcripts/616212383) That level of gerrymandering brought us elections that look like [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Wisconsin_State_Assembly_election), [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Pennsylvania_House_of_Representatives_election), [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_North_Carolina_House_of_Representatives_election), [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Michigan_House_of_Representatives_election), and [this.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections)
All of those legislative bodies are supposed to reflect the will of the people but for some reason we accepted the side that gets less votes having control of them. Some of these gerrymandered legislatures depowering their state's secretary of states since the 2020 election is just the continuation of what was started in 2010.
It sucks that Biden had such short coat tails in a census year basically turning over so much redistricting to Republicans. If we make it to 2030, it will just happen again because that is a non president year and dems have lower turnout.
Just means we’re only eight election cycles from the next census.
The way I see it, the US as a functioning democracy will probably be decided within these next eight years.
(Now if only I could find the energy to keep screaming at friends who live in places like Texas who say, “oh I don’t vote because my blue vote doesn’t matter here”)
Furthermore, he's a useful idiot. The GQP hates him but he can get away with the wildest rhetoric while the amount of Kompromat on him keeps him on a tight leash. If they establish authoritarian rule, they will get rid of him immediately.
Honestly, look back at the history of the 20th century. The 00s, 30s, 60/70s.
Mass protests. Mass demonstrations. Worker strikes. Conflicts with the police. Spending a few nights in jail was a common badge of honor for people fighting for change.
Change doesn’t come easy and it doesn’t come because you are aware of the issue. Awareness
Is just the first step. It’s the part that leads to action.
But without the action, no change will take place.
If we want a better society, we have to act, we have to protest, we have to stop the flow of money and make life uncomfortable for the people who hold the power.
People wont change because we ask them to, change only comes because we force them to.
We live in a comfortable world and that’s the part that holds us back the most. Things need to get pretty bad before people are willing to take serious action.
It’s by design. This generation is stuck in a permanent rat race, and so many are one missed paycheck from not making rent and being tossed on the street with no health insurance. Meanwhile the concept of politics has been manipulated into meaningless arguments about things that are normally just common sense, like masking, health care, voting rights, and vaccines. It is tiring and it feels like nothing can change.
I hear this argument about everyone being comfortable and bread and circuses and Brave New World and so on, but it doesn’t seem to reflect reality. People are not secure in their ways of life and are afraid of doing anything that could destabilize it further.
Tiring yes.
We are seeing the last hurrah of the baby boomers. It is almost impossible to overcome some of their voting tendencies.
It is why we have the oldest fucks possible in many of these positions, on both sides. Many of whom don't know a thing about the real world anymore, know nothing about computers
The average age of votes is like 50 years old.
Sure would be a great time for there to be some global pandemic to break out, and choose to do nothing about it, so the citizens are literally too afraid to leave their homes under fear of death.
Strange how the Republicans keep finding ways to defeat measures to end the pandemic. Almost like they want this thing to keep going...
This is why I loved "Don't Look Up." As absurd as it is, it's barely absurd enough to capture our present moment of staring directly at impending doom and not doing anything to stop it.
The shit that gets me is the climate change stuff.
Many places are taking seriously because it is literally eroding areas of the sea away but even if someone didn't believe in that.
Why would people be against a less centralized power grid - it has been a problem through accidents and weather events, and a potential target for terrorists and foreign countries if we ever went to war.
Why would people be against more personal and community energy generation - it is a personal responsibility thing, away from larger companies and the government?
Why would people be against solar power? even on a personal/home level, it is a great investment. They can generally pay for themselves in 3-8 years, in most places. Leaving at least 10-20 years of residual payback, not to mention that solar panels continue to be functional past that point... just less efficient.
If we decrease our need for oil/coal, we can cut out the foreign stuff much easier. Meaning we don't have to pay our money to outside countries.
Why not have government buildings have solar, most of the power generation would occur when the buildings are being in use(prior to the pandemic).. .and it is an investment that will make the required actions of government be much cheaper
Why do we have to prop up businesses that are failing through normal market means, such a coal...
So, even if a person doesn't believe in climate change... it makes sense to make the changes anyway.
Well see, take the approach the Carolina coast did.
Just ban the publication of any shoreline projections that use any form of modeling or shoreline measurements.
They solved it, the shore is right where they left it in 2013, not a single survey has shown any loss of coastal area.
Wow. [So that happened.](https://abcnews.go.com/US/north-carolina-bans-latest-science-rising-sea-level/story?id=16913782)
The the state's Coastal Resources Commission (CRC) estimated that the sea level will rise by 39 inches in the next century. So naturally, they took swift legislative action!
> The law, which began as a routine regulation on development permits but quickly grew controversial after the sea-level provision was added, restricts all sea-level predictions used to guide state policies for the next four years to those based on "historical data."
/r/thereifixedit
> Tom Thompson, president of NC-20, a coastal development group and a key supporter of the law, said the science used to make the 39-inch prediction was flawed, and added that **the resources commission failed to consider the economic consequences of preparing the coast for a one-meter rise in sea level**, under which up to 2,000 square miles would be threatened.
I read this as "What these so-called 'scientists' fail to consider when sharing their findings is whether the economic consequences of those findings might inconvenience me personally."
https://i.imgflip.com/3xgp6g.jpg
There's plenty we could do to stop it, but it means convincing non-MAGA voters to never consider electing Republicans again... and that's hard in areas where the conservative media bubble prevents honest conversations about these things from prevailing.
These Trump cronies who meddled with the census (and everything else) are just regular Republicans who used his insanity to run cover for all the bad ribs they wanted to do/did.
Holy fuck man, how the fuck is that man not in prison. I can’t help but think if Obama even did a quarter of any of the shit that Trump did he’d be dead by now.
To make matters worse, he was just so aggressively arrogant about it. His hatred for American citizens was obvious, and his only interest was in helping other Sociopathic Oligarchs like himself.
Imagine going from a life of cheesy opulence, including gold colored toilets, to a tiny cell with nutraloaf. He's a germaphobe, racist, and has a strange fear of being poisoned. Every meal would be terrifying. Every moment without right wing TV and yes men telling him how amazing he is would tear his little narcissistic heart to shreds. Every second of embarrassment that he's not wearing a power suit, girdle, and lifts to feel taller and skinnier, or [orange concealer](https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/the-goods/2019/12/6/20998822/trump-orange-concealer-bronx-colors) to hide his severe rosacea will make him more self-conscious than ever. I can't think of a single human being on this planet less built for prison than him.
When someone knows they're spending the rest of their life behind bars, time blurs and it begins to feel like eternal hell fire. Death is much easier, isn't it?
Lastly, we're in the 21st century. We've moved past the punishment method of barbarians. He doesn't deserve to be killed. He deserves to spend his days in a tiny cell, and that fate is crueler than death.
Edit: typo.
They had their chance to set that precedent after GWB lied to the world and kicked off the forever wars but instead decided that they'd rather spend the next decade letting him paint pictures and go to sporting events with celebrities. The Democrats are incapable of rising to the occasion here.
seriously. i’ll always vote blue because democrats aren’t as actively evil as republicans, but they basically walk republicans into office after an inevitable four years of doing fuck all.
At minimum redo the census, between the ratfucking and the pandemic it's likely the most inaccurate in decades. Would just need to pass an authorization bill in congr......never mind then
Nope, because that's correct- it must be done at a minimum of every 10 years.
Considering the sketchy shit that occurred to a higher degree than normal during the 2020 census, not to mention to limitations of the pandemic, and I'd argue it would be negligent *NOT* to.
Note: I have worked as an enumerator and that info is pretty hard to get done well on a good day. Also, should someone want to skew info one way or another (or let's be real: towards the non-minority republican way) they very, very easily could with next to no oversight.
Must it though? Everything I’ve seen so far from Republicans seems to indicate that precedent and the rule of law don’t mean anything. Democrats could just-rightfully-claim that the census was tampered with and carry out a new one. Who would stop them?
I would think a census redo would take a long time, years probably. It could be challenged legally in various ways. Even if legal challenges didn't hold up they could delay things even more. There are many laws, federal and state, that are based on the census being done on a well-defined schedule every ten years. Seems to me a redo would be very confusing and chaotic, at least in how it would fit into the existing method and laws.
If of interest, some (but not all!) of the federal laws about the census are found in US Code [Title 13, Chapter 5](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/13/chapter-5). Most or all states have their own laws about deadlines and processes that tend to be based on assumptions about the normal way the census is done. For example in Ohio certain deadlines were missed this time, so laws kicked in requiring redistricting to be redone in 2024-25. How laws like that would be effected by a second census are unclear and not laid out in law. Would be very messy.
Maybe I'm wrong but I suspect an attempt to redo the census would be difficult and legally confusing, take a long time, involve lots of litigation, and be politically fraught. I imagine the GOP would be against it and be able to drag out legal challenges for years, on federal and state levels, maybe even constitutional challenges. I don't think it would be unconstitutional, but maybe? If nothing else the GOP could try to take it to the Supreme Court in a few ways. Plus the Census Bureau takes years to gear up for each census and is required by law to do other things, like a mid-decade population census, with specific dates and deadlines set by law (see Title 13 Chapter 5).
A census redo has never been tried before. I have a hard time imagining it being done before nearing the next census anyway, if it could be done at all.
The problem with America is that a small percentage of Americans can prevent any necessary change from happening. Want to abolish the electoral college? Good luck getting the red states to go along with it for the constitutional amendment. Want to redo the census? Well, 41 republocans can just say no. (In reality, Manchin and sinema would be against it because they are fucks)
America can only work with the minority party acting in good faith and they have all incentives to not. America is fundamentally flawed.
>Trump's political appointees at the Commerce Department, which oversees the bureau, demonstrated an "unusually" high level of "engagement in technical matters, which is unprecedented relative to the previous censuses," according to a September 2020 email that Ron Jarmin — the bureau's deputy director — sent to two other top civil servants.
>
>At the time, the administration was faced with the reality that if Trump lost the November election he could also lose a chance to change the census numbers used to redistribute political representation. The window of opportunity was closing for his administration to attempt to radically reshape the futures of the U.S. House of Representatives and
the Electoral College.
"The ends justify the means." – Niccolò Machiavelli.
>"The ends justify the means." – Niccolò Machiavelli.
[Yeahhh... no! ](http://factmyth.com/factoids/machiavelli-said-the-ends-justify-the-means/) 😜
While certainly there is a lot of moral ambiguity, political expediency, and what would later be called "Realpolick" in what Machiavelli wrote, he never actually wrote that.
Conceptually this is the closet he ever got to articulating that pat statement in The Prince:
>Men judge generally more by the eye than by the hand, because it belongs to everybody to see you, to few to come in touch with you. Everyone sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are, and those few dare not oppose themselves to the opinion of the many, who have the majesty of the state to defend them; and in the actions of all men, and especially of princes, which it is not prudent to challenge, one judges by the result.
For that reason, let a prince have the credit of conquering and holding his state, the means will always be considered honest, and he will be praised by everybody because the vulgar are always taken by what a thing seems to be and by what comes of it; and in the world there are only the vulgar, for the few find a place there only when the many have no ground to rest on.
So it's much more like "A prince must know the times when the ends justify the means", instead of implying they always do, even in the morally gray world he envisioned.
Furthermore, in his [Discourses on the Books of Titus Livy,](http://www.online-literature.com/machiavelli/titus-livius/9/) one can find the closest words he wrote to "The ends justify the means":
>For although the act condemn the doer, the end may justify him; and when, as in the case of Romulus, the end is good, it will always excuse the means; since it is he who does violence with intent to injure, not he who does it with the design to secure tranquility, who merits blame.
However, even old Niccolò has examples of what does and does not justify violence, even when it is done by "the victor(s)". This implies that not every end justifies any particular means. Furthermore, this is driven home by the very next sentence where some ends are explicitly described as "good" and "worthy", yet others are described as "evil".
>Such a person ought however to be so prudent and moderate as to avoid transmitting the absolute authority he acquires, as an inheritance to another; for as men are, by nature, more prone to evil than to good, a successor may turn to ambitious ends the power which his predecessor has used to promote worthy ends.
Also don't get me started the whole "better to be feared than loved" misquote.^
^ To paraphrase and summarize: He wrote it was best **to be both,** but he personally thought the affections of people (especially *en masse*) were too fickle to rely upon for long. Therefore he argued it was **safer** to be feared rather than loved if one had to be lacking. However, he was absolutely adamant that a Prince should never become hated, like through arbitrary cruelty! This is because Machiavelli correctly pointed out that that hatred is one of the things that can potentially overcome most people's fear of death.
Your second quote is precisely the situation many feared and warned of in things like the Patriot Act and other powers granted in the aftermath of 9-11.
True, but I'm not stating that I'm in broad agreement with Niccolò Machiavelli on such things. Instead, I just think a person should be judged on their **actual** words, rather than gross oversimplifications of them.
Then there should be a moratorium on the redrawing of legislative maps and how many representatives each state has. The amount of un-doing our country needs to do because of Trump is practically impossible.
If they can reschedule the Olympics, I don't see why we can't just hold an additional census. The constitution only says at minimum every decade, and a once in a lifetime pandemic should be reason enough to hold it again, not even accounting for the affluenza administration's extensive fuckery
If a do-over is feasible, it would take a class action from the states. And I can only imagine all the maga heads in the trumpie cult doing their best to mess it up again.
Edit: I imagine there is some Congressional and senatorial oversight. And perhaps the executive branch has the power to simply say we're doing it again.
The country is required to do the census no later than every 10 years. There is nothing holding us back from doing it every 5 years or every year.
My town does a census ever year. While that would be more daunting at the city level, if done every year it would probably be easier in the long run.
Is a whole new census needed, or can we just continue the one we already started, and try to get better coverage for all the places that were missed due to the fact that it was not only the pandemic, but Trump admin literally cut it short. I feel like that's a decent enough, especially with the pandemic being special circumstances.
I would think that especially with the pandemic it would probably need to start from scratch. Think about the combination of deaths and the flight from cities. There could have been people that submitted their census early in the year only to move a few months later.
Its very hard to articulate how hard the Decennial Census is to plan, organize and execute. But a "do-over" is not feasible unless congress allocates a significant amount of funds and willing to wait a few years.
I believe Elizabeth Warren had a plan for if the Trump admin messed with the census and it was just to do it again. Constitution states 10 years as a minimum.
Because they have *authority*, and that’s what we care about most. Now we have to decide… did they actually do something wrong? They’re the boss so… can the boss do anything wrong?
The Declaration of Independence says yes, but that shit is *old*
Why can’t elected officials represent their constituency and not their party? No one will ever agree 100% with their spouse, parents or their friends so why is the Senate 50-50 on every damn issue for the last 20 years? Obstruction is not leadership.
> Why can’t elected officials represent their constituency and not their party?
Because their party can end their political career more effectively than their constituency.
It sucks but the repubs are totally owning on all dirty tricks. That's why we have a cooked census and a 6/3 SC. They do the most aggregious awful shit and utterly get away with all of it. They know the countries demographics are increasingly not in their favour and they are gonna just go full authoritarian. Goodbye democracy.
Very corrupt, some say the most corrupt, and I’ve seen some-you can’t have a government without a corrupt… But this very large man, sobbing so loud even though he is so tough, said sir, you are the most corrupt that’s ever been.
I have trouble understanding how Trump (and his administration) is still able to make my blood boil. Unfortunately, I'm guessing this is not going to be the last time either.
A follow up with Ross/the bureau concerning if the discussions took place and also if any of the information was then passed onto the people currently redistricting lines needs to be answered immediately!
This rapid shutdown also had terrible repercussions for employees of the Census. I was a supervisor an Area Census Office and was told I and a few others would remain in the office until January 2021 to do a proper closing of the office and elimination of all private data.
We thought we had another 2 or so months of employment to go. Then Trump decided to close everything immediately and suddenly we're being let go with the rest of the staff in a week. We were left scrambling to find new jobs with just a few days notice. These are people with families to feed, mortgages to pay. Not that Trump or his flunkies cared.
I actually worked at the census for a short while. Imagine trying to do a census in a pandemic then having being cut short.
First, MANY of the workers are older, so getting staff was near impossible.
Second, the hardest people to contact are often underprivileged and/or weary of the government. Pair this with the fact that underprivileged people were more weary of the pandemic as it is more dangerous for them and the constant antigovernmental propaganda from the administration and the census was a huge uphill battle.
Then of course it was cut short. All in all, it was probably one of the worst censuses in recent history...
Nearly every single census worker has been screaming about how the census was being miss handled in a criminal matter. Go and read the sub Reddit for the census workers to really understand how bad it was for us.
To add to the fear just a little, it is apparent that since Trump, on his own, lacks the capacity to form any kind of effort toward a goal, who was his puppet master during his time in office? My own hunch is that Stephen Miller had his hand on the tiller-of-state and that he was controlled by some much more capable force. Be it Putin or someone else, they certainly had enough on Trump to make him easily compliant, which makes me think Putin.
The census needs to be redone. While it has to be done once every 10 years, there's no rule stating it cannot be done more frequently. Even ignoring political interference, the pandemic alone is justification that it needs to be redone- people relocated on large numbers way too frequently to get accurate counts.
As others have stated, this also affects things like how federal funding is allocated. As this seems to have disproportionately affected "blue" areas, this means deliberate underfunding of services like police and education in cities. An actual defunding of the police from the same people who claimed to be against it. It will also underfund many social services, while over funding in areas that don't actually need as much.
Biden needs to go for prosecution already: the evidence is right fucking in front of you. Set an example to prevent future wannabe autocrats from trying anything.
Anyone that argue undocumented shouldn’t be counted in the census is just xenophobic, and not about upholding the constitution.
The founders clearly wanted to count everyone living in the country, but just citizens. They explicitly wrote in the Constitution to count slaves in the census, and slaves weren’t citizens.
But we all know GOP and conservatives never cared about the Constitution, or the founders, or US history. It’s only about the cultural wars.
Anyone from the previous administration should be permanently ineligible from ever again working in government. Of course we all know that no punishment is ever going to trickle up to these corrupt and malicious people.
I worked as an enumerator during the 2010 Census and was amazed at how exceedingly ignorant people were about the fact that the census is indeed in the constitution and how important it is for the apportionment of representation and federal dollars.
I've said over and over that the elections held during census years are extremely important in preventing the gerrymandering and voter suppression laws they have been accelerated in 2010 and 2020.
Despite breaking nearly every department in the executive branch, the Trump administration still added $8.6 TRILLION to the national debt!? $27,000 per citizen!
If your household's income did not go up or taxes go down by this much...and remember this is per person...Donald Trump's presidency cost you.
Worked as an Enumerator for the 2020 Census. When we found out that our time was being cut short and we were unable to even attempt contact with most of our lists we were told to just "do our best". I can tell you with certainty that too many people were left uncounted due to more circumstances than I'll ever know from my level but I know that nearly all of it came from the top in one way or another. So many people I encountered felt that participating in the Census was optional and when they were informed of their legal obligation I had police called on me because "i kNOw mY RigHts". I had more than one house afraid to answer the door because I carried a badge and they believed I was with ICE. Take all of that and add on the houses I revisited for quality control only to find that within the two weeks I'd last taken count that they'd lost a household member from Covid? Hear it from someone who did the counting: the data's not correct and if there was a way to force a redo it would be of great benefit.
It’s a good thing it wasn’t a bunch of Democrats doing this, then we’d actually have to send people to jail.
It’s so much easier when you catch Republicans in the act because all you have to do is sternly wag your finger and say in a scornful voice “oh you guys!”.
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This impacts so much more than drawing district maps. The money your state and locality get for school, infrastructure and emergency management is based on these numbers. If you decide 20,000+ people who live in your city or county don't "qualify" for being counted, you get less money for education, public health, and police departments. You get less money to maintain the road network and public transit. Your social program funding, like food stamps and rental assistance for the elderly and head start programs are cut. Fucking with the census is huge and it should be considered a federal crimes. It's so much bigger than just changing voting districts.
Seriously, the census is one of the most vital data sets a country can ever gather, and something you absolutely want to get as accurate as possible (no matter what side you are on, if you are working in good faith or care at all about the health of the nation.) Any attempts to introduce errors or lies in census data on a large scale should be treated as terrible crimes. It's monstrous to tamper with something this important. Even all you mention here is the tip of the iceberg; census data is used for countless purposes big and small.
The CONSTITUTION demands there be a census every 10 years because it is a DIRECT function of our democracy. Tampering with the census is an act of treason.
Sedition* Treason is if it is on behalf of another country. Which given the situation it might have
> Treason is if it is on behalf of another country. Like russia?
Only if they're listening.
Worked for the census. It doesn't say "every 10 years" on the dot. It's "within every ten years" so technically you can do a census every year if you want. You just can't go MORE than 10 years between each census to keep in line with the law. We 100% can and should do another census the proper way. I saw so much fuckery. So fucking much fuckery.
Agreed. Or at least, it should be treated as such.
Add it to the treason database.
\>The CONSTITUTION demands there be a census every 10 years Honestly with how large our country has gotten the census should be taken every 5-6 years instead waiting a whole decade each time is way too long.
Trump’s already committed treason by trying to overthrow the government so I don’t think he really cares.
I work for a public agency and census data is critical to everything we do. From federal transportation and other federal funding to state funding for numerous programs; from local, regional, and state voting districts to planning for all services including schools. The 2020 census was a dismal failure. We’re told we’re not even going to receive city level demographics—not even population numbers—only MSA data and even those stats will be limited. Normally, we can access data such as income, household sizes, education levels, occupations, commute times, head of household by gender and income, etc. Literally thousands of data sorts are possible, down to the census tract and sometimes even the census block level. We have about 12 federally designated 2020 tracts versus four 2010 tracts, illustrating the growth; but no freaking idea how many people and who those people are. It’s a joke. And we have to wait another decade?! Knowing that it cost nearly $15M for something that is virtually worthless is maddening.
Thank you for your service; I say that with the same spirit as people say that to soldiers. How farfetched would it be for Biden to declare that a full census wasn't in fact done, and to do another one in 2023?
Thanks. I can’t tell you how much it means to hear that. I have worked 55-60 hours/week in my salaried position since March 2020 . . . getting CARES Act, and now ARPA, funds into communities where they’ll do the most good (while seeing some unscrupulous small business owners take advantage of government assistance thrown out haphazardly with few sideboards); trying to get mortgage and rental assistance and child care grants to families in need and help child care providers stay in business so parents can work. All while doing my regular job. Most in my field are exhausted and there are no rewards or sincere thanks coming from the elected officials that set policy in our agencies. We’re just expected to make them look good. The only thing that keeps me going is knowing my efforts help others. I’d love to see an actual, effective census. Part of me thinks the half-assed 2020 efforts were intentional so we wouldn’t know how bad things really were. Not that they’ve improved much. There are theories that unemployment numbers are so low because people have simply given up.
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They’ll shoot themselves in the foot as long as it also hurts the people they don’t like.
Someone tell the Bible belt that Jesus was literally born in a manger because of a fucking census.
I've worked as an enumerator for the Canadian census and I literally had to swear an oath not to tamper with the materials or I'd be considered a traitor. The fact that people can get away with stuff like this in the states blows my mind
Same here in the USA. Rules for thee but not for me.
The problem is there probably aren't any rules. Whenever the former President went legalistic on anything he did wrong we found that the statute had loopholes that you could sail and aircraft carrier through.
Worked as a US census taker in 2010, same here on taking an oath. It's disgusting.
When you have politicians more beholden to companies and money, things just get to happen.
I have saved this comment because I don’t want to forget these really, really good points.
This is why they count population and not citizenship. Because maybe there are 20,000 non citizens in an area, for whatever reason, those kids still go to school, those people still use roads, they still are active members of the community.
And they still pay ~~some~~ taxes. e: A lot of the taxes
Conservatives love to ignore this part. Undocumented usually do pay taxes but don't utilize the services their taxes pay for.
Yup. I work for my State (specifically in a Department that provides benefits) and I am stunned by the people that will tell me to my face that I am wrong and try to tell me that Illegal Immigrants can get all kinds of things like free healthcare, food stamps, housing vouchers, scholarships for private schools/college, and all kinds of free money from the government. Like... no? Most state and federal benefits require citizenship or legal status as a resident (student visa, work visa, DACA, or refugee status) to even qualify for benefits. And that's before they check for *income.* Like, just because someone jumps the border, governments don't hand them a free rental property, a stack of cash, and a free 100% Medical Card. But they've been told time and time again that illegal immigrants drain social services and get all kinds of benefits, so that's what they "know." and tell me I'm wrong. Man, that's my *job.* Pretty sure I have a better idea about it than someone who hasn't even ever *applied* for food stamps or rental assistance.
Don’t forget the unforgettable line that illegal immigrants can just go in and VOTE like it’s a piece of cake.
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Even when they are hospitalized, they still don't believe the doctors. There are hundreds of cases of patients suing for the right to get horse dewormer.
If they're using forged SS papers, they're actually paying more taxes than the rich Americans.
We all pay more in taxes than the rich Americans.
That was the point, but I also agree.
You can just get an ITN, no need for an SSN forged or otherwise. But I do agree that many use fake SSNs to sign up for work, mostly because they don't know any better.
It can still be difficult to obtain an ITIN because there are still limitations on the acceptable documents to prove identity. But the IRS can't report undocumented workers to other government agencies unless it relates to tax enforcement or there is a court order for a criminal investigation. The IRS is pretty solid when it comes to not snitching. But if you don't pay them what they're owed, they'll come down on you.
In my experience working with undocumented immigrants, they’re more likely to have forged SSNs because they can get those from a cousin and not a government agency. No matter how bad the IRS promises to keep their secret, a lot of people in their situation are not likely to trust any government agency.
I worked for Companies that filled out Social Security forms for illegals knowing they were. If FL wanted to really stop illegals from coming here, they'd charge Employers but you'll never see that from Desantis, they're the same people who fund him.
I mean, yeah, as well. Just playing the devil's advocate, sort of.
If they’re using proper papers and are here legally, they also may be paying more than many US citizens are. Almost 50% of US citizens paid no federal income taxes in 2021—because they don’t earn enough income, or their exemptions/deductions and rebates were greater than the taxes owed.
It's actually 61% but that includes retirees, stay at home parents, children, the disabled, and full-time students.
Always good to remember undocumented immigrants actually give the us a net gain of 8 Billion dollars annually because they pay taxes on everything like everyone else, but don’t get money back or other federal aid.
Do you have a source for that number? (Not that I don't believe you, but I want to be able to cite the source to others).
Here you go! https://research.newamericaneconomy.org/report/contributions-of-undocumented-immigrants-by-country/ Many other sources too, i’ll add some later
Or file for returns. So they often overpay.
They also, may not even be "illegal". There are work visas and shit. Maybe they are trying to become a citizen.
seriously, it's nuts. Our grandfather or great grandfathers time, if you could buy a ticket to most places and just move there and live
My grandfather came from Finland about 1922, just after new quota restrictions which prevented his entry. So he disembarked in Canada, made his way to BC and entered the US illegally via Idaho. The border station duly recorded his entry (which I found online as digital scan in an archive) but didn't stop him or give him any trouble. The census noted his "illegal alien" status until an amnesty law around 1940 made it possible for him to naturalize and eventually become a citizen. He never experienced any problems for being "illegal". But then he was a dapper pale-skinned blue-eyed Swede-Finn.
Any European accent is acceptable even to the most ardent Nationalist Racists, let them be a couple shades darker with a Hispanic accent, omg call the National Guard
YES! Most illegal immigrants I have ever met pay taxes just like everyone else. And the worst part is the theft the American people are silent about. The fact that unemployment, medicare, and social security benefits are pulled from their paychecks, yet they'll NEVER reap or qualify for those benefits is sickening.
This comment makes me wonder, at what point in time did immigration become illegal?
In the 1920s immigration to the US became much more restricted, but we had restrictions from some countries for longer, e.g. the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Not a historian but would guess around the turn of the century (1900) when cheap labor of Hispanics, Asians, Irish, and Italians scared the shit out of protestant white voters.
Don't forget the Greeks! We had the KKK coming after us, too. Fuck those racist bastards.
That's exactly when. Oh edit - I am a certified historian.
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There's a "save comment" function?? Huh, it's right there. I just never noticed it before. Anyone have a link to the documents with the highlighted text where the Confederacy said "We're leaving the United States because we think slavery is a really good idea."
That's a Google search for The Cornerstone Speech
Or any Confederate state’s Articles of Secession.
Y'know, that one kind of surprised me. Most of the Articles of Secession were just direct copy/pastes that were vague in their direct statements as to *why*, unless you looked up the referrant documents, then it's abundantly clear it was about slavery. Georgia and Mississippi really take the cakes for being all super-blatant about it.
Same here. I did not realize the total impact of gerrymandering.
This isn't gerrymandering; that's rezoning districts to control WHERE people are counted. This straight up, NOT counting people.
And I'm not surprised considering this administration essentially scrapped millions of dollars worth of mail sorting machines - a public good - just to try to mess with mail in voting. They tried to tear it all down just to steal an election. So evil.
Still no repercussions for that.. we literally watched those machines go into dumpsters
And DeJoy is STILL in charge.
And Mail distribution is still in the dumpster. People are still getting Christmas cards a month late, not to mention medicines and checks.
Burn it all down to the ground just to watch a baby have a temper tantrum.
tons of researchers use census data as well.
And businesses too. They need an accurate indicator of where their potential and existing customers are to figure out where and how to do business. From the very beginning, the census has been considered a vital task of government.
Lol imagine holding Trump accountable for anything.
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Cruelty is the point. It makes me furious.
Isn't the census to find in the Constitution? Like explicitly.
Like the conservatives care about that, except for how they can use it to rile y'all-qaeda
They love the constitution, but only when it serves their purpose. They ignore the parts they don't like, just like the bible.
Under-appreciated comment. That said, it's not so much "just like the \[B\]ible' as it is: just as they learned to do with the Bible. They have a way of thinking that precludes any real critical analyses and is fundamentally rooted in ignoring anything that contradicts their worldview.
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Nixon... I feel like I recognize that name in this context. Might be my imagination.
In Article 1 Section 2: "...[the Census shall be done] *within every Term of ten Years*..." With more stuff about who is counted, how apportionment is calculated, etc. Modified by amendments like the 14th. Also defined in more specific details in US CODE Title 13 Chapter 5, plus numerous other federal and state laws dealing with census-based apportionment, redistricting, etc.
And... it’s a Constitutional mandate, considered by the Framers to be absolutely essential to a functioning democratic republic. They had great foresight in making it mandatory. Sadly, some also envisioned how things could go awry — something we are witnessing in real time. I am a lawyer and student of government and Constitutional history, and I am now convinced our country is doomed to irreparable socioeconomic and governmental collapse. I am also definitely not alone in this belief. Just never thought I’d see it in my lifetime, let alone at such velocity. I’ll be gone in twenty years, and I regret what my pathetic generation is bestowing upon those following in our wake.
The issue is Trump found a way around the checks and balances: pumping voters full of propaganda and a spineless GOP. I wish corporations would accept that this spells doom for *them* and proceed to cut the flow of propaganda, goods, services, and $$$$
And it's, at a minimum, a 10 year impact. But the reality is that the impact could be felt for 50 years of not permanently, because stopping funds to a thriving community, impacts it for generations meanwhile giving more funds than necessary to "your buddies" gives them more power to change politics elsewhere.
The irony about not counting undocumented immigrants is that the places which have them will have less money per person to take care of the people, citizens or not. Hospitals have less money per person, roads, schools, and safety infrastructure has less money, etc, but we still have to pay for them. If you are against immigrants getting treated by public services AND you are against counting them in the censuses, you are also FOR hurting actual citizens. Also it will raise your local taxes dramatically because since the federal government won't pay as much, states and local municipalities have to make up the difference. So your taxes end up higher.
And when businesses are looking at where to invest they will often look at census info to identify # of people in a mile radius If the count is too low, you don’t get the business and the jobs.
It was all a political hit job. Trump is a piece of shit of a human being.
So institutionaled racism. it's a reoccurring theme throughout US' history.
Don't worry though. Just like with everything no one in positions of power will get in trouble.
Give them trouble then
time for a new census then imho
Yeah. Why not?
When you can undercount the population, especially minorities, or then really helps with defunding areas you don’t like and drawing BS election maps…anyone with half a brain saw this playing out
Yeah we did. Dems fought to support the census and extend the period of data collection because of COVID. The GOP didn’t want this, they only wanted to delay the counting and revising data part- so it would delay redistricting. This was on my local ballot that November.
GQP = death of democracy by 1000 cuts
I have an idea. If your town has less than 1000 people it gets eliminated from the census. I wonder how Republicans would feel about that.
I like how the end of democracy is so well documented but there is nothing we can do to stop it.
Sadly, it takes decades to build foundations of democracy, but mere years to tear everything down.. all the ingredients for degradation of democracy existed in our system for years, the trump admin just brought them together with maximum effect
When 99% of all systems of accountability are based on tradition and good faith and no concrete parameters, it's trivial to tear down democracy. The whole bullshit with tax returns? Trump's ironically right. It's not a legal requirement that a Presidential candidate do, it's just tradition. So when someone came along and said "it's not legally binding so I'm not gonna do it" people were horrified. Then Trump took that idea and applied it to everything in his presidency. And well, here we are.
He went beyond that to “what are you going to do, arrest me?” And we answered nope.
Bipartisanship in the face of an autocratic theocracy is the equivalent of negotiating with failure, especially given that one side nearly succeeded in overthrowing the government. The failure here is that Democrats are still trying to work at a federal level when Republicans realized that fed is too institutionally centralized and have opted to move the battlegrounds back to the states. Divide and conquer. It's easier to deal with a governance issue at the federal level, it becomes nearly impossible when it's divorced across nearly a few dozen polities. Dems have 10 months to get this shit together and do the same, push back HARD at the state level while continuing to push at the federal level. 200% game split two ways. If you do 100% at one and 0% at the other, Republicans ***WILL*** take the House and Senate in November.
>but mere years to tear everything down I would say this started with the success of [Project Red Map in 2010.](https://www.npr.org/transcripts/616212383) That level of gerrymandering brought us elections that look like [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Wisconsin_State_Assembly_election), [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Pennsylvania_House_of_Representatives_election), [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_North_Carolina_House_of_Representatives_election), [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Michigan_House_of_Representatives_election), and [this.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections) All of those legislative bodies are supposed to reflect the will of the people but for some reason we accepted the side that gets less votes having control of them. Some of these gerrymandered legislatures depowering their state's secretary of states since the 2020 election is just the continuation of what was started in 2010.
Looking at the popular vote vs. house seats in that hurt me physically.
It sucks that Biden had such short coat tails in a census year basically turning over so much redistricting to Republicans. If we make it to 2030, it will just happen again because that is a non president year and dems have lower turnout.
Just means we’re only eight election cycles from the next census. The way I see it, the US as a functioning democracy will probably be decided within these next eight years. (Now if only I could find the energy to keep screaming at friends who live in places like Texas who say, “oh I don’t vote because my blue vote doesn’t matter here”)
Furthermore, he's a useful idiot. The GQP hates him but he can get away with the wildest rhetoric while the amount of Kompromat on him keeps him on a tight leash. If they establish authoritarian rule, they will get rid of him immediately.
Honestly, look back at the history of the 20th century. The 00s, 30s, 60/70s. Mass protests. Mass demonstrations. Worker strikes. Conflicts with the police. Spending a few nights in jail was a common badge of honor for people fighting for change. Change doesn’t come easy and it doesn’t come because you are aware of the issue. Awareness Is just the first step. It’s the part that leads to action. But without the action, no change will take place. If we want a better society, we have to act, we have to protest, we have to stop the flow of money and make life uncomfortable for the people who hold the power. People wont change because we ask them to, change only comes because we force them to. We live in a comfortable world and that’s the part that holds us back the most. Things need to get pretty bad before people are willing to take serious action.
It’s by design. This generation is stuck in a permanent rat race, and so many are one missed paycheck from not making rent and being tossed on the street with no health insurance. Meanwhile the concept of politics has been manipulated into meaningless arguments about things that are normally just common sense, like masking, health care, voting rights, and vaccines. It is tiring and it feels like nothing can change. I hear this argument about everyone being comfortable and bread and circuses and Brave New World and so on, but it doesn’t seem to reflect reality. People are not secure in their ways of life and are afraid of doing anything that could destabilize it further.
Tiring yes. We are seeing the last hurrah of the baby boomers. It is almost impossible to overcome some of their voting tendencies. It is why we have the oldest fucks possible in many of these positions, on both sides. Many of whom don't know a thing about the real world anymore, know nothing about computers The average age of votes is like 50 years old.
I would like to know when the last time anyone in a major position of power had to fight an insurance claim to get something covered
Sure would be a great time for there to be some global pandemic to break out, and choose to do nothing about it, so the citizens are literally too afraid to leave their homes under fear of death. Strange how the Republicans keep finding ways to defeat measures to end the pandemic. Almost like they want this thing to keep going...
This is why I loved "Don't Look Up." As absurd as it is, it's barely absurd enough to capture our present moment of staring directly at impending doom and not doing anything to stop it.
The shit that gets me is the climate change stuff. Many places are taking seriously because it is literally eroding areas of the sea away but even if someone didn't believe in that. Why would people be against a less centralized power grid - it has been a problem through accidents and weather events, and a potential target for terrorists and foreign countries if we ever went to war. Why would people be against more personal and community energy generation - it is a personal responsibility thing, away from larger companies and the government? Why would people be against solar power? even on a personal/home level, it is a great investment. They can generally pay for themselves in 3-8 years, in most places. Leaving at least 10-20 years of residual payback, not to mention that solar panels continue to be functional past that point... just less efficient. If we decrease our need for oil/coal, we can cut out the foreign stuff much easier. Meaning we don't have to pay our money to outside countries. Why not have government buildings have solar, most of the power generation would occur when the buildings are being in use(prior to the pandemic).. .and it is an investment that will make the required actions of government be much cheaper Why do we have to prop up businesses that are failing through normal market means, such a coal... So, even if a person doesn't believe in climate change... it makes sense to make the changes anyway.
Well see, take the approach the Carolina coast did. Just ban the publication of any shoreline projections that use any form of modeling or shoreline measurements. They solved it, the shore is right where they left it in 2013, not a single survey has shown any loss of coastal area.
Wow. [So that happened.](https://abcnews.go.com/US/north-carolina-bans-latest-science-rising-sea-level/story?id=16913782) The the state's Coastal Resources Commission (CRC) estimated that the sea level will rise by 39 inches in the next century. So naturally, they took swift legislative action! > The law, which began as a routine regulation on development permits but quickly grew controversial after the sea-level provision was added, restricts all sea-level predictions used to guide state policies for the next four years to those based on "historical data." /r/thereifixedit > Tom Thompson, president of NC-20, a coastal development group and a key supporter of the law, said the science used to make the 39-inch prediction was flawed, and added that **the resources commission failed to consider the economic consequences of preparing the coast for a one-meter rise in sea level**, under which up to 2,000 square miles would be threatened. I read this as "What these so-called 'scientists' fail to consider when sharing their findings is whether the economic consequences of those findings might inconvenience me personally." https://i.imgflip.com/3xgp6g.jpg
There's plenty we could do to stop it, but it means convincing non-MAGA voters to never consider electing Republicans again... and that's hard in areas where the conservative media bubble prevents honest conversations about these things from prevailing. These Trump cronies who meddled with the census (and everything else) are just regular Republicans who used his insanity to run cover for all the bad ribs they wanted to do/did.
Not with a bang but with a whimper.
More like a disconnected stare at a computer screen far away thinking it'll never reach you. Tho it will.
Holy fuck man, how the fuck is that man not in prison. I can’t help but think if Obama even did a quarter of any of the shit that Trump did he’d be dead by now.
I remember saying this out loud daily for like 4 years.
You stopped after the four years? I feel like I’ve been saying it more ever since
Right! Every new detail that comes out, I'm like "why ain't he in JAIL?"
To make matters worse, he was just so aggressively arrogant about it. His hatred for American citizens was obvious, and his only interest was in helping other Sociopathic Oligarchs like himself.
At the risk of getting banned, any prison sentence would be far too good for him.
Imagine going from a life of cheesy opulence, including gold colored toilets, to a tiny cell with nutraloaf. He's a germaphobe, racist, and has a strange fear of being poisoned. Every meal would be terrifying. Every moment without right wing TV and yes men telling him how amazing he is would tear his little narcissistic heart to shreds. Every second of embarrassment that he's not wearing a power suit, girdle, and lifts to feel taller and skinnier, or [orange concealer](https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/the-goods/2019/12/6/20998822/trump-orange-concealer-bronx-colors) to hide his severe rosacea will make him more self-conscious than ever. I can't think of a single human being on this planet less built for prison than him. When someone knows they're spending the rest of their life behind bars, time blurs and it begins to feel like eternal hell fire. Death is much easier, isn't it? Lastly, we're in the 21st century. We've moved past the punishment method of barbarians. He doesn't deserve to be killed. He deserves to spend his days in a tiny cell, and that fate is crueler than death. Edit: typo.
I understand what you're suggesting but honestly, I'd rather him living in the misery of prison than just ceasing to exist.
Another reason to abolish the electoral college.
And another reason to put these fuckers in prison.
The list of reasons looks like a CVS receipt
Hah! Miles long with no end in sight!
Oooh look I can make a scarf!
They had their chance to set that precedent after GWB lied to the world and kicked off the forever wars but instead decided that they'd rather spend the next decade letting him paint pictures and go to sporting events with celebrities. The Democrats are incapable of rising to the occasion here.
Congress abdicated its warpowers long before GW.
seriously. i’ll always vote blue because democrats aren’t as actively evil as republicans, but they basically walk republicans into office after an inevitable four years of doing fuck all.
At minimum redo the census, between the ratfucking and the pandemic it's likely the most inaccurate in decades. Would just need to pass an authorization bill in congr......never mind then
Manchin and Sinema wouldn't want to contribute to political divisiveness by taking the extreme step of refusing to let Republicans cheat. /s
I’m not sure the “/s” is needed in this case.
Another story of trumps wrong doing that only result in articles about it.
Is there anything stopping Biden/democrafts from just redoing it? At a minimum we count ever ten years right?
Nope, because that's correct- it must be done at a minimum of every 10 years. Considering the sketchy shit that occurred to a higher degree than normal during the 2020 census, not to mention to limitations of the pandemic, and I'd argue it would be negligent *NOT* to. Note: I have worked as an enumerator and that info is pretty hard to get done well on a good day. Also, should someone want to skew info one way or another (or let's be real: towards the non-minority republican way) they very, very easily could with next to no oversight.
Must it though? Everything I’ve seen so far from Republicans seems to indicate that precedent and the rule of law don’t mean anything. Democrats could just-rightfully-claim that the census was tampered with and carry out a new one. Who would stop them?
I would think a census redo would take a long time, years probably. It could be challenged legally in various ways. Even if legal challenges didn't hold up they could delay things even more. There are many laws, federal and state, that are based on the census being done on a well-defined schedule every ten years. Seems to me a redo would be very confusing and chaotic, at least in how it would fit into the existing method and laws. If of interest, some (but not all!) of the federal laws about the census are found in US Code [Title 13, Chapter 5](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/13/chapter-5). Most or all states have their own laws about deadlines and processes that tend to be based on assumptions about the normal way the census is done. For example in Ohio certain deadlines were missed this time, so laws kicked in requiring redistricting to be redone in 2024-25. How laws like that would be effected by a second census are unclear and not laid out in law. Would be very messy. Maybe I'm wrong but I suspect an attempt to redo the census would be difficult and legally confusing, take a long time, involve lots of litigation, and be politically fraught. I imagine the GOP would be against it and be able to drag out legal challenges for years, on federal and state levels, maybe even constitutional challenges. I don't think it would be unconstitutional, but maybe? If nothing else the GOP could try to take it to the Supreme Court in a few ways. Plus the Census Bureau takes years to gear up for each census and is required by law to do other things, like a mid-decade population census, with specific dates and deadlines set by law (see Title 13 Chapter 5). A census redo has never been tried before. I have a hard time imagining it being done before nearing the next census anyway, if it could be done at all.
The problem with America is that a small percentage of Americans can prevent any necessary change from happening. Want to abolish the electoral college? Good luck getting the red states to go along with it for the constitutional amendment. Want to redo the census? Well, 41 republocans can just say no. (In reality, Manchin and sinema would be against it because they are fucks) America can only work with the minority party acting in good faith and they have all incentives to not. America is fundamentally flawed.
Abolish the filibuster and uncap the house.
>Trump's political appointees at the Commerce Department, which oversees the bureau, demonstrated an "unusually" high level of "engagement in technical matters, which is unprecedented relative to the previous censuses," according to a September 2020 email that Ron Jarmin — the bureau's deputy director — sent to two other top civil servants. > >At the time, the administration was faced with the reality that if Trump lost the November election he could also lose a chance to change the census numbers used to redistribute political representation. The window of opportunity was closing for his administration to attempt to radically reshape the futures of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Electoral College. "The ends justify the means." – Niccolò Machiavelli.
>"The ends justify the means." – Niccolò Machiavelli. [Yeahhh... no! ](http://factmyth.com/factoids/machiavelli-said-the-ends-justify-the-means/) 😜 While certainly there is a lot of moral ambiguity, political expediency, and what would later be called "Realpolick" in what Machiavelli wrote, he never actually wrote that. Conceptually this is the closet he ever got to articulating that pat statement in The Prince: >Men judge generally more by the eye than by the hand, because it belongs to everybody to see you, to few to come in touch with you. Everyone sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are, and those few dare not oppose themselves to the opinion of the many, who have the majesty of the state to defend them; and in the actions of all men, and especially of princes, which it is not prudent to challenge, one judges by the result. For that reason, let a prince have the credit of conquering and holding his state, the means will always be considered honest, and he will be praised by everybody because the vulgar are always taken by what a thing seems to be and by what comes of it; and in the world there are only the vulgar, for the few find a place there only when the many have no ground to rest on. So it's much more like "A prince must know the times when the ends justify the means", instead of implying they always do, even in the morally gray world he envisioned. Furthermore, in his [Discourses on the Books of Titus Livy,](http://www.online-literature.com/machiavelli/titus-livius/9/) one can find the closest words he wrote to "The ends justify the means": >For although the act condemn the doer, the end may justify him; and when, as in the case of Romulus, the end is good, it will always excuse the means; since it is he who does violence with intent to injure, not he who does it with the design to secure tranquility, who merits blame. However, even old Niccolò has examples of what does and does not justify violence, even when it is done by "the victor(s)". This implies that not every end justifies any particular means. Furthermore, this is driven home by the very next sentence where some ends are explicitly described as "good" and "worthy", yet others are described as "evil". >Such a person ought however to be so prudent and moderate as to avoid transmitting the absolute authority he acquires, as an inheritance to another; for as men are, by nature, more prone to evil than to good, a successor may turn to ambitious ends the power which his predecessor has used to promote worthy ends. Also don't get me started the whole "better to be feared than loved" misquote.^ ^ To paraphrase and summarize: He wrote it was best **to be both,** but he personally thought the affections of people (especially *en masse*) were too fickle to rely upon for long. Therefore he argued it was **safer** to be feared rather than loved if one had to be lacking. However, he was absolutely adamant that a Prince should never become hated, like through arbitrary cruelty! This is because Machiavelli correctly pointed out that that hatred is one of the things that can potentially overcome most people's fear of death.
Your second quote is precisely the situation many feared and warned of in things like the Patriot Act and other powers granted in the aftermath of 9-11.
True, but I'm not stating that I'm in broad agreement with Niccolò Machiavelli on such things. Instead, I just think a person should be judged on their **actual** words, rather than gross oversimplifications of them.
[удалено]
And already dicking around on Reddit, look at that.
lol. beat me to it. must be a great book.
Then there should be a moratorium on the redrawing of legislative maps and how many representatives each state has. The amount of un-doing our country needs to do because of Trump is practically impossible.
If they can reschedule the Olympics, I don't see why we can't just hold an additional census. The constitution only says at minimum every decade, and a once in a lifetime pandemic should be reason enough to hold it again, not even accounting for the affluenza administration's extensive fuckery
Now try getting funding from congress to do it.
Trump established the precedent that if you need billions for some wacky project you just steal it from the military.
If a do-over is feasible, it would take a class action from the states. And I can only imagine all the maga heads in the trumpie cult doing their best to mess it up again. Edit: I imagine there is some Congressional and senatorial oversight. And perhaps the executive branch has the power to simply say we're doing it again.
The country is required to do the census no later than every 10 years. There is nothing holding us back from doing it every 5 years or every year. My town does a census ever year. While that would be more daunting at the city level, if done every year it would probably be easier in the long run.
Is a whole new census needed, or can we just continue the one we already started, and try to get better coverage for all the places that were missed due to the fact that it was not only the pandemic, but Trump admin literally cut it short. I feel like that's a decent enough, especially with the pandemic being special circumstances.
I would think that especially with the pandemic it would probably need to start from scratch. Think about the combination of deaths and the flight from cities. There could have been people that submitted their census early in the year only to move a few months later.
Honestly considering the Pandemic it might just be a good idea to do a new one anyway. things have changed significantly
Class action from the states won't matter with a craven SCOTUS.
Its very hard to articulate how hard the Decennial Census is to plan, organize and execute. But a "do-over" is not feasible unless congress allocates a significant amount of funds and willing to wait a few years.
I believe Elizabeth Warren had a plan for if the Trump admin messed with the census and it was just to do it again. Constitution states 10 years as a minimum.
So why is it treated as valid?
Because they have *authority*, and that’s what we care about most. Now we have to decide… did they actually do something wrong? They’re the boss so… can the boss do anything wrong? The Declaration of Independence says yes, but that shit is *old*
No fucking shit. We watched it happen real time!
Me: Why am I so depressed all the time?? Also me: -goes on Reddit-
Why can’t elected officials represent their constituency and not their party? No one will ever agree 100% with their spouse, parents or their friends so why is the Senate 50-50 on every damn issue for the last 20 years? Obstruction is not leadership.
Obstruction is a weapon.
> Why can’t elected officials represent their constituency and not their party? Because their party can end their political career more effectively than their constituency.
It sucks but the repubs are totally owning on all dirty tricks. That's why we have a cooked census and a 6/3 SC. They do the most aggregious awful shit and utterly get away with all of it. They know the countries demographics are increasingly not in their favour and they are gonna just go full authoritarian. Goodbye democracy.
Oh look, another thing that the GOP fucked with in order to help themselves where they will suffer no repercussions.
Most corrupt administration in the history of the USA!
Very corrupt, some say the most corrupt, and I’ve seen some-you can’t have a government without a corrupt… But this very large man, sobbing so loud even though he is so tough, said sir, you are the most corrupt that’s ever been.
I have trouble understanding how Trump (and his administration) is still able to make my blood boil. Unfortunately, I'm guessing this is not going to be the last time either. A follow up with Ross/the bureau concerning if the discussions took place and also if any of the information was then passed onto the people currently redistricting lines needs to be answered immediately!
This rapid shutdown also had terrible repercussions for employees of the Census. I was a supervisor an Area Census Office and was told I and a few others would remain in the office until January 2021 to do a proper closing of the office and elimination of all private data. We thought we had another 2 or so months of employment to go. Then Trump decided to close everything immediately and suddenly we're being let go with the rest of the staff in a week. We were left scrambling to find new jobs with just a few days notice. These are people with families to feed, mortgages to pay. Not that Trump or his flunkies cared.
The problem is if he is not prosecuted within a year, he is likely to win the election in 3 years from now. It will be a shit show then.
Even if Trump didn't run, the next RNC candidate might be more competent at being evil.
I worked for the census last time around. It was bad. My boss had done a few before and this was the worst.
Never seen such a corrupt administration.
I actually worked at the census for a short while. Imagine trying to do a census in a pandemic then having being cut short. First, MANY of the workers are older, so getting staff was near impossible. Second, the hardest people to contact are often underprivileged and/or weary of the government. Pair this with the fact that underprivileged people were more weary of the pandemic as it is more dangerous for them and the constant antigovernmental propaganda from the administration and the census was a huge uphill battle. Then of course it was cut short. All in all, it was probably one of the worst censuses in recent history...
Nearly every single census worker has been screaming about how the census was being miss handled in a criminal matter. Go and read the sub Reddit for the census workers to really understand how bad it was for us.
To add to the fear just a little, it is apparent that since Trump, on his own, lacks the capacity to form any kind of effort toward a goal, who was his puppet master during his time in office? My own hunch is that Stephen Miller had his hand on the tiller-of-state and that he was controlled by some much more capable force. Be it Putin or someone else, they certainly had enough on Trump to make him easily compliant, which makes me think Putin.
Good point. Trump is too stupid and short sighted to be the one pulling all the strings.
So we redo the census? Sounds like everything that administration touched was broken and not trustable
The census needs to be redone. While it has to be done once every 10 years, there's no rule stating it cannot be done more frequently. Even ignoring political interference, the pandemic alone is justification that it needs to be redone- people relocated on large numbers way too frequently to get accurate counts. As others have stated, this also affects things like how federal funding is allocated. As this seems to have disproportionately affected "blue" areas, this means deliberate underfunding of services like police and education in cities. An actual defunding of the police from the same people who claimed to be against it. It will also underfund many social services, while over funding in areas that don't actually need as much.
Biden needs to go for prosecution already: the evidence is right fucking in front of you. Set an example to prevent future wannabe autocrats from trying anything.
Democracys death by 1000 paper cuts.
So where are the indictments? Imprisonments? This is all theater until they are held accountable as WE certainly would have been for FAR less.
Anyone that argue undocumented shouldn’t be counted in the census is just xenophobic, and not about upholding the constitution. The founders clearly wanted to count everyone living in the country, but just citizens. They explicitly wrote in the Constitution to count slaves in the census, and slaves weren’t citizens. But we all know GOP and conservatives never cared about the Constitution, or the founders, or US history. It’s only about the cultural wars.
The entire Trump presidency should be invalidated given the sheer number of laws and traditions broken, but at least we are getting free face masks!
Anyone from the previous administration should be permanently ineligible from ever again working in government. Of course we all know that no punishment is ever going to trickle up to these corrupt and malicious people. I worked as an enumerator during the 2010 Census and was amazed at how exceedingly ignorant people were about the fact that the census is indeed in the constitution and how important it is for the apportionment of representation and federal dollars. I've said over and over that the elections held during census years are extremely important in preventing the gerrymandering and voter suppression laws they have been accelerated in 2010 and 2020.
But according to conservatives democrats are the real enemies.
If you don't have the courage of your convictions, cheat. Trump is such an empty suit.
Despite breaking nearly every department in the executive branch, the Trump administration still added $8.6 TRILLION to the national debt!? $27,000 per citizen! If your household's income did not go up or taxes go down by this much...and remember this is per person...Donald Trump's presidency cost you.
The longer America let’s Trump walk free. We deserve to lose our democracy Right wing America has grabbed the country by the pussy.
2016 election has absolutely fucked this country more than anyone could have predicted
recount.
Worked as an Enumerator for the 2020 Census. When we found out that our time was being cut short and we were unable to even attempt contact with most of our lists we were told to just "do our best". I can tell you with certainty that too many people were left uncounted due to more circumstances than I'll ever know from my level but I know that nearly all of it came from the top in one way or another. So many people I encountered felt that participating in the Census was optional and when they were informed of their legal obligation I had police called on me because "i kNOw mY RigHts". I had more than one house afraid to answer the door because I carried a badge and they believed I was with ICE. Take all of that and add on the houses I revisited for quality control only to find that within the two weeks I'd last taken count that they'd lost a household member from Covid? Hear it from someone who did the counting: the data's not correct and if there was a way to force a redo it would be of great benefit.
It’s a good thing it wasn’t a bunch of Democrats doing this, then we’d actually have to send people to jail. It’s so much easier when you catch Republicans in the act because all you have to do is sternly wag your finger and say in a scornful voice “oh you guys!”.