For months, maybe a year, hard-right Republican politicians like Minnesota Rep. Michelle Bachmann have been whipping up anti-census furor. In her own endearingly deranged way, Rep. Bachmann has made a convincing (-sounding, if you have a contentious relationship with reality) case for not filling out the 2010 Census form the government onerously intones is required by law. No freedom-loving American wants to be sent to a reeducation camp, where government thugs will thrash them within inches of their lives until they profess deep love for our Democratic president, the New World Order, and hummus.
Nowhere is anti-Census taken more seriously than the Republic of Texas. In the same span of time that Bachmann and, closer to home, Ron Paul have been registering their dissatisfaction with the very idea that The Man wants a headcount of His people, Texas has threatened succession and excised Thomas Jefferson from history textbooks. Texans take their right-wingedness seriously enough that many of them have been trashing Census forms that arrive in their mailboxes.
As of Friday afternoon, only 27 percent of Texas households had filled in and returned their census forms — well below the national average of 34 percent — according to computer data from the U.S. Census Bureau. In Harris County, the response rate is 23 percent. Houston’s returns are running at 21 percent.
They probably don’t know it, but they’re doing the entire country a favor by being so vociferously oppositional to taking five to ten minutes to fill out some paperwork.
Texas is counting on the 2010 Census to deliver four new congressional districts, four new Electoral College votes in presidential elections, and millions of dollars in additional federal aid. … What’s more, an under-count in Texas could cost the state more than just representation. For every Texan missed, the state will lose an estimated $12,000 over the next decade in federal funding for transportation, agriculture, health, education, and housing, said Frances Deviney, director of Texas Kids Count, a nonpartisan group in Austin.
If the fringe is upset about being underrepresented in government, they’ll soon find that to be even more the case – and they won’t have anyone to blame but themselves. Not that it will stop them from trying.
