Bill Pascrell: “I have heard pretty horrible things on this floor, but I just heard the worst that I have ever heard. To say that…”

“I have heard pretty horrible things on this floor, but I just heard the worst that I have ever heard. To say that someone has the time to fill out a Medicaid form but does not have the time to fill out a census questionnaire misses the whole point. What if you never got a questionnaire in the first place? Oh, there is the rub. I have heard on this floor a tremendous amount of discussion with little anchor in reality. I have been in two censuses. The enumerators worked very hard to find those people who either, one, did not fill out their questionnaire, or two, never got one in the first place. But in order to get to those people, you have to know where they live. You have to have a housing unit on your form. The secret, by both Democrats and Republicans, and past administrations have admitted this, the secret to getting an accurate census is to have accurate addresses. In a five-family house, if we have 22 mailboxes, that should give us a clue that we are not going to be able to do this by questionnaire alone. They missed the whole point, and they do it deliberately. They do it deliberately. This is serious business we are talking about. We cannot call someone who ran the Census under President Bush out of a Democratic liberal think tank. Give me a break. She believes that there is a way, through statistical methods, to come up with an accurate sample.”