'Census-sational' news roundup

Let's hope all the hoopla over the Census Director reporting directly to the White House isn't a harbinger on the actual success of the 2010 Census. It's certainly shaping up to be one of the more interesting Census counts in recent years, as evidenced by this week's news cycle:

GOP sounds alarm over Obama decision to move Census to White House

The Census goes to the White House - what were they thinking?

White House nabs political control over Census

BOEHNER WARNS AGAINST WHITE HOUSE TAKEOVER OF TRADITIONALLY NONPARTISAN CENSUS:
“It just tells me that the census, the counting of the population of the United States is going to be politicized. This is very simple, Chris, the Constitution says that every ten years there will be a count of all persons who live in the United States. That means that we need to have an actual count. And why this has to be moved from the Commerce Department over to the chief of staff’s office, I would think he’d have better things to do, than to coordinate the census, but apparently they have ideas about what they might want to do to politicize the counting of our population next year.”

Is Obama politicizing the Census?

White House: Census Director to 'work closely' with West Wing

Fox News Segment
Special Report w/Bret Baier (transcript):
ROBERT GIBBS, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: I think the historical precedent of this is there is a director of the census that works for the secretary of commerce, the president, and also works closely with the White House to ensure a timely and accurate count. And that's what we have in this instance.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BAIER: Hmm. It is the Friday lightning round. We will start with a topic, one topic about the census, the 2010 census, being taken out of the Commerce Department, essentially, and put into oversight at the White House.

We will start with this topic — Bill Sammon?

SAMMON: Think about this. The Commerce Department has always had the Census Bureau for many years, because you're supposed to insulate the Census Bureau from politics.

Every ten years we take a census, and the results have great significance. You redraw the congressional districts so it impacts political power, and you distribute federal dollars based on population.

So it's a political football. What do they do? They take it away from Judd Gregg, the newly minted nominee for Commerce, and put it in, presumably, Rahm Emanuel's portfolio, which is very alarming.

BAIER: Juan?

WILLIAMS: Politics? The census has always been about politics. And what we have here are Latino officials who are concerned that Judd Gregg was going to be in charged, and they said that when Judd Gregg was in the Senate, he was not supportive of making sure there were enough officials to get the census. This will redraw distributes, it has political consequences. So I don't see any problem with bringing it to the White House. It just makes official what we have all known—it's political.

KRAUTHAMMER: You will make it un-political by sticking it in the White House? That sounds illogical to me.

The constitution has a lot of "shall nots" about Congress and the executive. One of the rare items it demands is a census, and it expects that it would be objective, and it ought to be Commerce.