John Doolittle: “I am not a supporter of the disastrous proposal by the Clinton administration and the minority party in this House to do…”

“I am not a supporter of the disastrous proposal by the Clinton administration and the minority party in this House to do statistical sampling, for a number of reasons. I think it is clearly unconstitutional. I think we have a recent Supreme Court decision handed down at the beginning of this year, a fair reading of which would be to conclude that it prohibits both sampling for apportionment of representatives as well as for redistricting purposes within the States. I think, in the effort to make a more accurate count, in fact it introduces a high degree of subjectivity into the process, and in fact would be less accurate. And even if we accepted the fact that somehow this might be valid, we would have to have it with an administration that we could trust, and this administration is the most partisan one in history. This is an administration that we cannot trust on the issue, for example, as they have proven with the manipulation of campaign finance laws or of the immigration procedures, all designed to affect the outcome of an election. So the trust threshold is low here.”