40 Days Without a Leader
| Tue Jun. 23, 2009 11:00 AM PDT
On Friday, May 15, I attended the confirmation hearing for Robert M. Groves, Obama's designee to become the next director of the U.S. Census Bureau. Groves, formerly an academic from the University of Michigan, has dedicated his life to census-related matters. A total of three senators attended his hearing, including Susan Collins, the lone GOP representative. Without objections, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs unanimously approved Groves' nomination by voice vote five days later. However, Groves's confirmation by the full Senate has been stalled by at least one anonymous Republican senator. Under Senate rules, a Senator can hold up a nomination without going public or providing an explanation.
It has now been 40 days since Groves's nomination hearing. One reason for the anonymous hold may be Groves's support for statistical sampling. This practice is controversial because it involves using expert opinions to calculate the accuracy of figures rather than relying solely on a door-to-door headcount. As Time reported, when Groves was "an associate census director in the 1990s, [he] angered Republicans by supporting a statistical adjustment to compensate for the 1990 undercount."
However, sampling should be a nonissue because the method was banned for decennial headcounts by the United States Supreme Court, and Groves has sworn not to use it for the 2010 Census.
In addition to Groves, 61 other Obama nominees remain unconfirmed. (Also, Obama has yet to fill 210 open positions.) The longer these positions sit vacant, the greater the chance that bureaucratic errors will be made due to a lack of leadership.
And no place is more prone to bureaucratic error than the Census Bureau.
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Comments
Bad Karma, huh?
Submitted by Brian on Wed Jun. 24, 2009 3:55 PM PDT.
This is what happens when your party tries to rig the Census.
Somewhat controversial due
Submitted by Joanne Cox (not verified) on Thu Jun. 25, 2009 3:52 AM PDT.
Somewhat controversial due to it involving the use of expert opinions to come up with the accuracy of the numbers as opposed to just relying on a headcount.
Regards
I may be wrong, but I think
Submitted by Matt (not verified) on Mon Jun. 29, 2009 1:41 PM PDT.
I may be wrong, but I think it's a bit sweeping to say that "sampling...was banned for decennial headcounts by the United States Supreme Court"
The article you link to says "In January, however, the Supreme Court ruled against the use of statistical sampling methods to obtain population figures for determining how many of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives go to each of the 50 states. At the same time, the court upheld a law that mandates the use of statistically adjusted figures, when feasible, for all other purposes, such as distributing $180 billion in funds for federal programs and determining congressional and state district boundaries."
So even though Groves has sworn off using sampling techniques, the Court seems to have said that they can use sampling to determine counts for everything besides setting the number of House members each state gets. Now, you obviously know more about the census than I, but this seems like the fairest reading of the Court's decision and of the article you linked to.
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