Jeff Miller: “tonight is a very important evening because the University of Florida Gators will become the national champions in…”

“tonight is a very important evening because the University of Florida Gators will become the national champions in basketball. It is very exciting for someone who graduated from the University of Florida many years ago to see an exciting young team of freshmen and sophomores that are going to be successful against the supposedly more experienced team from Michigan State. So it will be an exciting evening, and I am looking forward to it. But I am actually rising tonight, Madam Speaker, to speak about the census. We are in the middle of the Census 2000. Officially, this past Saturday, April 1, was Census Day, and that was the day we wanted to have everyone counted where they are. It is a chance to get a snapshot of America that is taken every 10 years going back to 1790, when Thomas Jefferson conducted the first one. This is a chance to not only count people, and that is the constitutional purpose, to count people where they are so we can do apportionment and redistricting in this country, but it is also important to get that snapshot because the Federal government has grown so large over the past decades that it is in need of information to help fund those programs.”