Day 788 Tuesday March 5, 2019
608 Days to the 2020 election and 686 Days to Inauguration Day
I didn’t write a screed yesterday because I was busy writing about an old friend, the Unix operating system.
It is now fifty years old, which for anything in computing is ancient. Why has it survived?
As Fred Brooks wrote in his classic “Mythical Man Month” and I paraphrase some things take time. Or to put it another way “You can’t have nine men jump on a woman and get a baby in a month.”
He also said that the secret to survival is adaptability.
What made Unix survive?
It was carefully thought out and was designed in answer to specific problems that had been addressed earlier but not solved in a sufficiently satisfying way. There was a core philosophy that is in some ways hard to explain. It was also written and allowed to develop without a lot of external pressures by people who didn’t know or understand what this tightly knit group was trying to accomplish.
But, as Arlo Gutherie said in his classic record Alice’s Restaurant, “This isn’t what I came here to talk to you about.”
Today, let’s look at another question that has been raised and that is the idea of putting the question of :
“Are you a U.S. citizen?”
on the census form, and the analogous statement of:
“Only U.S. citizens should be counted in the Census.”
There is a problem with each statement and I’ll address that here so you know where I’m going ahead of time.
One) If you want to know if people are U.S. citizens there is a better, more accurate way to get that data than asking on a census form, because people who are not citizens are reluctant to say to the government for fear of retribution (ie deportation.)
Two) The Constitution says that for the purpose of representation and taxes all person shall be counted. It does not say anything about being a citizen. Unless, one wants to ignore the Constitution, the second statement’s action would be unconstitutional.
How did we get here? By that I mean why is this being raised as an issue? The answer is that the conservative right wing forces want more power and if they can disenfranchise people who don’t vote for them they gain more power. It’s really that simple. There is no concern about fairness, only aggrandizement of power.
Where did this effort start? Somewhere in the bowels of scheming by the rich right wing who had Wilbur Ross suggest it. But he couldn’t do it without cover so he asked Jeff Sessions, when Jeff was Attorney General, to send him a letter requesting it. When asked about it Ross lied and said he hadn’t made such a request.
The people at Census are dedicated to counting everyone, as is their duty under the Constitution. When they were ordered by Ross to put the citizenship question on the 2020 Census form they balked. First, it wouldn’t give them an accurate number. Secondly, they could get more accurate data another way and because the Department of Justice said they needed the data for some reason they, the people at Census, offered to meet with the Justice folks and show them how they, the Census Bureau, could give them more accurate data at a much cheaper price than putting it on the Census form. What did Justice do? They were instructed by AG Sessions not to take the meeting.
Okay, so I’ve established that this would be unconstitutional and that it has nothing to do with getting the data, but is really being used to undercount the people who are not citizens so that the states that have those people (most notably California) won’t be given as much representation or funding. This will in turn reward states with fewer immigrants. In other words Wyoming and the welfare red states. They will get even more money while screwing the states with lots of people needing help.
There’s a deeper issue here and I don’t think it’s been discussed anywhere that I know of. It centers around the reasoning for why we as a nation went to war for our independence. To quote Patrick Henry, “No taxation without representation.” This is the nub of the argument.
Britain had elected representatives. The country underwent a population shift. People moved to the coal producing areas, like Manchester. However, the representation didn’t change. Those areas with expanded populations did not get anymore representation than when they were sparsely populated. Parliament dismissed the disparity with the excuse of “Oh Manchester is like such and such place, we can let the chaps in such and such make decisions for Manchester.”
When the colonies in America were formed this was the thinking there as well. So the colonies got no representation in Parliament. As the Boston Tea Party emphasized, this didn’t go over well.
So to put the argument in historical terms “no taxation without representation.” To put it in Constitutional terms “All the people get counted.” To put it in current political terms – this is a callous attempt to deprive people who pay taxes (working immigrants) of representation and aid, and to intimidate them and maybe use this data to kick them out of the country.
Next?
PS Temple of the Inscriptions, Palenque, Mexico
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