Molly Ivins June 12

AUSTIN, Texas — The stupidity of Republicans is a constant source of wonder to me. But not since they shut down the federal government on the grounds that it would be a nifty thing to do have I seen them pull a stunt this boneheaded.

To take the disaster relief bill for all those poor folks up in the Dakotas and Minnesota and mess it up by attaching every pol's pet peeve, piece of pork and political advantage-seeking is just unconscionable. Now, in their latest shrewd move, they're trying to blame President Clinton for vetoing the bill. As usual, the question is: "How dumb do they think we are?"

The Republican National Committee is running all these radio ads in the upper Midwest: Tell President Clinton to stop holding up our disaster relief. As though we hadn't noticed who made the disaster relief bill into the Political Bonanza Special. Sen. John McCain of Arizona, usually a good guy, was on television the other night pleading for his No Government Shutdown amendment. If they want to fix it so they can't do the same stupid thing they did two years ago, fine. But let them do it on somebody else's nickel — not that of a bunch of flooded-out farmers in the Midwest.

But the dumbest, ugliest part of what the Republicans have done to "disaster relief" is this attempt to foul up the 2000 Census. This is partisanship at its rankest.

As you know, the census is the national snapshot we take once every 10 years to find out how many of us there are and where we are. (Census takers aren't allowed to ask nosy personal questions.) The census has gotten fouled up with politics because it's used 1) as the basis for redistricting, always a partisan political brawl and 2) to allocate federal funds for all sorts of programs — highway construction, housing assistance and so on. The more people you have in your city, county and state, the more money you get. So naturally, all the local pols want every nose counted.

But the people whose business is doing the counting know that's impossible. Quite often, no one's home when the census taker knocks on the door, and there's only a limited amount of time for them to come back and try again. Also, senior citizens and people in high-crime areas are frequently too frightened to open the door to a stranger, even some nice lady who announces that she's there to count you for the government.

The last time I was out with the census takers was back in 1980 in a rural area of southern Utah. Respectable Mormon folks, no problems there, eh? Wrong. The census takers ran into the most amazing gamut of problems you ever saw.

These nice ladies (a lot of housewives sign up to do census work) were out in the desert yelling, "Yoo-hoo, I'm from the government!" after a bunch of guys disappearing into a cloud of dust on muleback.

Turns out those citizens were running a little moonshine still out there in the very dry (in both senses of the word) Utah desert. Other census takers were up on mountain ridges riding snowmobiles as they tried to track down mountain men — anti-social folks who hadn't talked to another human being in years.

We found some people living in caves. We found a trailer full of Vietnamese refugees, an extended family of 27 people all named Minh, none of whom spoke English. Getting a count on that bunch was a real challenge. Then there were these enormous houses containing very large families of people who were extremely reluctant to be interviewed. They turned out to be polygamists; there's still an estimated 10,000 people who practice polygamy out West. (The census takers had no interest in their family organization — they were just trying to get a count.) One census worker had no sooner announced she was with the government than this one householder offered to pay the taxes he had cheated on.

Very poor folks are notoriously hard to count — homeless people, street people, many of them too ashamed to admit they don't have a place to live. There aren't any hotel registers underneath the bridges of the nation. Both legal and illegal immigrants tend to be scared to death of the government.

To counter all this, census takers have developed sophisticated statistical sampling methods that yield an accurate count — at least a lot more accurate than the nose-by-nose method. And this is what the political fight is all about.

Because racial minorities tend to be Democratic voters and undercounted, the Republicans are afraid that the Democrats will pick up some seats after congressional redistricting is done in 2001. The more alarmist Republicans are babbling about losing 25 seats. The experts in both census-taking and redistricting agree that this number is "hyperbolic" and "absurd." But it's got the Republicans scared enough to oppose the entire idea of statistical sampling.

They asked the National Academy of Sciences to study the question; the academy did so and reported back that statistical sampling was the best way to go. So the Republicans ignored the study. They are also ignoring the American Statistical Association and everybody else who knows about numbers and counting — all because they're afraid of losing some House seats, which a) is not likely to happen, and b) if it does, will be because the redistricting lines have been fairly drawn on the basis of an accurate population count. In other words, no cheating.

So in order to maintain this political advantage, which is probably mythical and in any case unethical, the R's are holding disaster relief for the Midwest hostage. Nice going, gang — classy show.

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Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

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