Americans: Fill Out Your Census!

There’s been a fringe campaign on the right for a little time now to get Americans to fill out their census forms lead by the infamously crazy Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann who likes to make up an alternate American history and present it as the actual American history. She’s been pushing the don’t-fill-out-your-census meme for some time now. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to be working. Josh Micah Marshall, editor of Talking Points Memo and also the proud recipient of a PhD in history from Princeton notes that even North Carolina Congressman Patrick McHenry (not the most sensible guy out there himself) thinks this is a bit too far:

Rightwing hullabaloo over the federal Census, particularly the improbable claim that the Census is unconstitutional, is reportedly leading a lot of the most conservative Republicans to refuse to fill out their Census forms, which in theory at least could lead to substantial underrepresentation for these folks in Congress over the next decade — not to mention a lower cut of services from the federal government.

That at least is what Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC), the ranking Republican on the committee that oversees the Census, thinks is happening. And he’s now taken to Redstate.com itself, Fever Swamp Central, to tell fellow conservatives to do the right thing and fill out their Census forms. As McHenry notes, it’s very hard to reason that the Census can be unconstitutional since it’s one of the only things the constitution not only provides broad powers to do but actually expressly enjoins the federal government to do every decade.

It’s not just the media and political elites either. Politico has a story on a poll that finds an overwhelming number of Americans either think the census is useful or just plainly isn’t an invasion of Americans’ privacy.

–Jasper Hart