Sean Patrick Maloney: “we are here today because we believe that a fair and accurate census is fundamental to the democratic principles on…”

“we are here today because we believe that a fair and accurate census is fundamental to the democratic principles on which our country was founded. We are here today because those principles are being threatened as never before. We have vowed to fight that threat to the very end. There are some in this Congress who seek to manipulate the census process to assure that the errors that have been made in the past continue. There is nothing that they will not do to achieve their ends. They began 2 years ago by saying that sampling is unscientific. When that did not work, they said that modern scientific methods are unconstitutional. When that did not work, they began to attack the plan for the 2000 census as too complicated. I suspect that the next tactic will be to attack the Census Bureau's ability to take the census. Their goal is to make sure that the errors of 1990 are repeated in the 2000 census, because they believe those errors are to their political advantage. Yesterday, the President of the United States was at a forum in Houston, Texas; and he called on the opponents of an accurate census to recognize that the census is about people, not about politics.”