Sean Patrick Maloney: “Mr. Speaker, the Commerce, Justice, and State bill is fatally flawed, and because of that, later today I will urge my…”

“Mr. Speaker, the Commerce, Justice, and State bill is fatally flawed, and because of that, later today I will urge my colleagues to vote against it. Earlier today we changed the House rules so that the Republican leadership could create a new subcommittee to investigate the census. Is the reason that we need this new subcommittee, is it because the current one is so overburdened that it cannot get all of its work done? No. There has been only one hearing in this Congress on the census, and that hearing had only two witnesses. This new subcommittee is the latest effort by the leadership to politicize the census and make sure that millions of minorities and poor are left out of the count. They try to hide behind the Constitution, but they do not care whether sampling is constitutional or not. Look at this quote from one Republican leader. He admits that they do not care if sampling is constitutional, and then later he says if the court says it is constitutional, we simply will not fund it. During the negotiations over the census language in this bill, the White House lawyers tried to improve the language to assure that the case would make it to the Supreme Court. Those improvements were rejected by the same people who claim to be worried about a constitutional census. Their concerns are not constitutional; they are political. The scientific and professional support for sampling is overwhelming.”