Tag Archives: Census

2022 Elections — A First Glance

By tmess2 | Published January 30, 2021

The 2020 elections left both the House and the Senate closely divided.  And two years is a long time in politics.  But experience has taught politicians two, somewhat contradictory, things that will impact what can get done during the next two years.

The first, especially for the House of Representatives, is that the President’s party typically loses seats.  But the reason for this normal rule is that a new President has typically helped members of his party to flip seats.  As such, this might be less true for 2022 than in the past.  In 2020, the Democrats only won three new seats, and two were the results of North Carolina having to fix its extreme gerrymander.  And only a handful of Democratic incumbents won close races.  And the rule is less consistent for the Senate, in large part because the Senators up for election are not the ones who ran with the President in the most recent election but the ones who ran with the prior president six years earlier.  In other words, the President’s party tends to be more vulnerable in the Senate in the midterms of the second term than in the midterms of the first term.  But the likelihood that the President’s party will lose seats is an incentive to do as much as possible during the first two years.

The second is that one cause of the swing may be overreach — that voters are trying to check a President who is going further than the voters actually wanted.  This theory assumes that there are enough swing voters who really want centrist policies and that they switch sides frequently to keep either party from passing more “extreme” policies.  Polls do not really support this theory and there is an argument that, at least part of the mid-term problem, could be the failure to follow through on all of the promises leading to less enthusiasm with the base.  But this theory is a reason for taking things slowly and focusing on immediate necessities first and putting the “wish list” on hold until after the mid-terms. Continue Reading...

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Census Shenanigans

By tmess2 | Published January 17, 2021

In theory, a President is still President with the full powers of the office until the last second of the term.  In practice, the powers of a president in the last weeks in office are somewhat limited.  Any legislative priorities that could not get through the previous Congress are unlikely to be rushed through by the new Congress.  (In fact, most times, Congress will spend much of the seventeen days between January 3 and January 20 in the necessary work of organizing rather than focusing on legislation.)

On the foreign policy front, it doesn’t take a Michael Flynn violating the law for our allies and adversaries to know that any decision made by the outgoing president can be quickly reversed by the new president.  In short, the outgoing president really is unable to make the type of long-term commitment that would encourage another country to make a deal.

So that leaves a president with actions that can be taken by the president alone.  Not surprisingly, the typical president is giving final approval to regulations and giving pardons and commuting sentences.  The enactment (or repeal) of regulations is a time-consuming process under the Administrative Procedure Act, and the new Administration is unable to simply set aside the last minute regulations.  (In part to deal with this problem, it is possible for Congress to reject these regulations.)  And a pardon or commutation is irreversible. Continue Reading...

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Census Watch 2021

By tmess2 | Published December 18, 2020

As folks who have followed this website for a long time know, the decennial census is something that I consider to be a very big deal.  And, while perhaps not as detailed as we did it back in 2011, I am hoping that we will do something as the numbers come out in the spring about what the numbers might mean for our chances at keeping and increasing the Democratic majority in the House.

Redistricting involves two action at the federal level and at the state level.  At the federal level, the results of the census are use to determine how many representatives each state gets (often referred to as apportionment).  At the state level, assuming that a state has more than one representatives, redistricting involves drawing the lines so that each district has roughly the same population (no more than a 5% gap between the largest and smallest district and preferably smaller).   At the current time, of course, we are dealing with actions at the federal level.  The ball only shifts to the state level once apportionment has occurred and the Census Bureau has released the detailed count (breaking population down to census blocks) to each individual state on a rolling basis.

The federal part of the process comes first and involves two steps:  one involving raw data and the other involving the application of a formula to that data.    The first step is the census finalizing its state level population numbers. According to federal law, by January 1, the Census Bureau is supposed to report its numbers to Secretary of Commerce who is to forward those numbers to the president.  Upon receipt of those numbers, the President is to calculate the number of representatives that each state is entitled to and, by January 10,  forward a statement setting forth the population of each state and the number of representatives that each state will have in the next Congress.  The calculation is done by the “method of equal proportions” (one of several mathematical formulas used to “fairly” allocate partial seats). Continue Reading...

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Trump and the Supreme Court (UPDATED)

By tmess2 | Published November 29, 2020

Even though Joe Biden will become President on January 20, Donald Trump is still the president.  Thus, until January 20, the policies of President Trump are still the policies of the U.S. Government, and Bill Barr and Noel Francisco still get to decide what position the U.S. will take in pending litigation

This week, the U.S. Supreme Court returns for its first set of oral arguments since Joe Biden became the presumptive President-elect.    And the session begins with a very big case — Trump vs. New York.  The issue in the case is whether unauthorized immigrants count as part of U.S. population in the census for the purpose of allocating congressional seats and government funding.

The big development on this case is that the Census Bureau will apparently be unable to meet the statutory deadline of late December for reporting the total count due to certain issues that have arisen in finalizing the count.    The U.S. Supreme Court had shortened the time limits on this case to make sure that they could hear arguments on it and issue a decision in a timely fashion.  But if the numbers will not be available until after January 20, and President Biden opts to use the full count, this case could disappear as moot.  I would prefer that the Supreme Court issue a decision upholding the plain language of the Constitution requiring a count of all persons residing in the U.S., but, as long as the Republicans attempt to manipulate the numbers fails, I can live with a non-decision. Continue Reading...

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Census Talk

By tmess2 | Published October 17, 2020

With a little less than two weeks to go before the election, developments concerning the 2020 Census are likely to get buried beneath the latest nonsense spouting from our President.  But the 2020 Census is going to be a very big deal next Spring, and what happens between now and January could have a significant impact.

The main purpose of the Census is to provide population figures for use by Congress in apportioning house seats to the states and for use by the states (and local government) in then drawing district lines for everything from congressional seats to city council seats.  As a secondary effect, some government grants to states and localities are also based on population.

Typically, the Census can be viewed as having three phases.  Phase One has historically been conducted by mail  — sending forms to every residential address and having the residents complete those forms.  This year, this phase was modified to allow people to respond on-line, but the essence of this phase remains the same in terms of it mostly relying on voluntary participation.  Phase Two is the field operation.  In this phase, workers go to residences that did not respond to try to get answers to the census by personal contact.  Finally, Phase Three is the compilation of this data. Continue Reading...

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Supreme Court — Eight Down, Twelve to Go

By tmess2 | Published June 22, 2019

On Thursday and Friday, the Supreme Court issued eight opinions in cases.  That leaves twelve cases still pending (including the two partisan gerrymander cases from March and the census case from April) heading into the last week.  Given that the Supreme Court has been issuing four opinions per day, it is likely that they will be adding two more opinion days to Monday’s opinion/order day.

The big story of this term continues to be that know precedent is safe from reconsideration by the “conservative” majority.  In four separate cases, there was a suggestion that the governing case be overruled or, at least, substantially modified. 

Gundy involved a provision of the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act.  The provision occurs in the section governing when individuals subject to the Act need to register.  The other provisions in this section dictate when new offenders have to register.  The questioned provision leaves it up to the Attorney General to establish the rules for when prior offenders have to register.  For the first time in decades, the Supreme Court was considering whether such a delegation violated the non-delegation doctrine (barring giving legislative power to an executive official).  Prior to 1940, this doctrine was used to undermine the early regulatory agencies.  Currently, the rule is that — as long as the statute granting the power to adopt regulations contains some “intelligible principle” — the delegation is merely about how to implement the legislative scheme and is valid.  This case resulted in a 4-1-3 split (as it was argued in the first week of October before Justice Kavanaugh joined the Supreme Court).  The four in the majority found — given the rest of the act and the rest of the section — that the Act had the goal of eventually requiring all sex offenders to register and that the delegation to the Attorney General was merely to establish the timing of when prior offenders would have to register.  The three in the dissent declined to infer such a principle — broadly reaffirming the validity of the non-delegation doctrine and strictly reading the requirement for an “intelligible principle.”  The fifth vote in the majority came from Justice Alito who indicated that he wanted to reconsider the last eighty years of cases on the non-delegation doctrine and only voted in the majority because there are worse examples than the Act.  (Basically a dissenting opinion styled as concurring in the judgment because a 4-4 vote would have resulted in an order showing the lower court affirmed by an equally divided court without opinions setting the stage for a drastic revision of the non-delegation doctrine once Justice Kavanaugh is able to sit on one of these cases (which may take some time as many of the regulatory cases come from the D.C. Circuit).  Only time will tell what these revisions might mean for the Securities Exchange Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Agency, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Continue Reading...

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June and the Supreme Court

By tmess2 | Published June 1, 2019

As the calendar flips to June, the Supreme Court tends to move to center stage of political life in America.  While, technically, the annual term of the Supreme Court runs from October to September, the Supreme Court tries to finish issuing opinions in its cases by the end of June.  As a result, June has most of the opinions on the most divisive and politically important cases. 

At this point, we have some information on what to expect for this month.  We know the cases that were argued (as the last argument was on April 24). We also know which cases have been decided and which cases remain to be decided and when those cases were argued.  That is a key fact because of how the Supreme Court usually operates.  At the Supreme Court, cases are argued in a two-week argument session (followed by a period of at least two weeks without argument).  In each argument week, the cases are discussed at a weekly conference (typically on Friday) and a tentative vote is taken.  After that vote, the senior justice in the majority (either the Chief Justice or the longest serving Associate Justice) assigns a justice to write the case.  (With the current splits on the court, in most cases, the senior justice will be either Chief Justice Roberts or Justice Ginsburg.)  Regardless of who assigns the cases, the assigning justice tries to keep the assignments balanced within the argument session (no more than two per argument session) and over the term as a whole.  This year, the argument sessions ranged from six cases to thirteen cases.  When all of the argument sessions are combined, there were sixty-nine argued cases (actually seventy, but one was quickly dismissed without opinion) for which an opinion either has been or will be issued.  Thus, we expect each justice to have seven or eight opinions for the entire term. 

At this point in time, we have the most information on the first four argument sessions.  Typically, opinions are issued between three and five months after the argument; so the Supreme Court has issued opinions in most of the “early” cases.  In October, there were nine cases argued (technically ten, but one of the cases was argued during the first week before Justice Kavanaugh was on the court and was quickly set for reargument in January implying a 4-4 split).  Of those nine cases, eight have an opinion.  In November, there were twelve cases argued; and opinions have been issued in eleven cases.  In December, there were ten cases argued; and opinions have been issued in eight cases.  Finally, in January, there were eleven cases argued; and opinions have been issued in eight cases.  On the opposite side, we only have a total of three opinions from the cases argued in February and March and none from the April arguments. Continue Reading...

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