Jeff Miller: “I rise in opposition to the Maloney amendment. It is, basically, a gutting amendment. It just guts the whole idea of…”

“I rise in opposition to the Maloney amendment. It is, basically, a gutting amendment. It just guts the whole idea of post-census local review. We know in 1990 there were 400,000 errors that were determined. We added 125,000 people. I think those are important people. We need to count people. We need to get the most accurate census, and this helps make it more accurate and builds trust. That is what this is all about. What, basically, the Maloney amendment does is it defeats the very nature of H.R. 472 by requiring that all local review take place prior to census day. This is called post-census local review. It prevents the possibility of doing it afterwards. The amendment affords the Secretary of Commerce the ability to exclude any post-census local review. Well, he has already stated he is opposed to it, so we are basically doing away with it by giving him the power to say, ``well, we do not want it.'' This is really getting politics more involved in it. We need to trust our local communities to know the right way to do it, be part of the process. It worked in 1980. I am amazed that somebody said it was a failure in 1990. If we added 125,000 people, are they not real people? Is that not really important? And we corrected these other mistakes. So I urge opposition, that we have a ``no'' vote on the Maloney amendment.”