RUSH: Kathleen, Kansas City, Kansas. It’s great to have you with us on the EIB Network. Hi.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. First-time caller, longtime listener, and I’m so excited to speak with you. I hope I can get my words out right. I’ve got a question concerning census — or not a question, comment. But I think the battle over the citizenship question is an exercise in futility, and here’s why. In 2010, I worked as a census taker in a real community, and I —
RUSH: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Does that mean you went door-to-door?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: And, like, how long did it take with your average citizen? You’re in your house, let’s say they agree to cooperate.
CALLER: No, no, no, no.
RUSH: How long were you in there with them?
CALLER: We’re not allowed to go in the house. I mean, there’s real safety factor there, let me tell you. You don’t go in their house. If they don’t answer it, you just left it on their porch. Typically, I just handed… I just said, you know, who I was, what I was doing, “Here’s the form; please return it,” and that’s all.
RUSH: Oh. You don’t ask them personal questions anymore?
CALLER: No, no, no, no.
RUSH: When I was growing up the census taker came and that’s what happened.
CALLER: No.
RUSH: My brother and I tried to find ways to mock it, tease them, lie to them about things, like we were Chinese.
CALLER: No, we did not do that. But I just feel like the battle over this question is an exercise in futility because I had, like, people in the rural areas — homegrown Americans — tell me that they refused to send it back because they didn’t want the government to know anything about it.
RUSH: Oh, yeah, yeah. I know that has been a problem, that people think that it’s a gigantic plot to —
CALLER: Find out about them.
RUSH: — vanish privacy, invade privacy, and that kind of thing.
CALLER: So the idea to think that anyone here illegally is going to answer questions honestly such as, “How many people in your household?” let alone the citizenship question, is unrealistic, if not ludicrous.
RUSH: Okay. Maybe so, and you may be right. But that still does not tell me we don’t put the question on. We put the question on it! Some people gonna answer it. We put the question on it. It’s a legitimate question. We put the question on the census survey. If they fill it out or don’t, that’s the problem with the census to deal with it. By the way, Kathleen, for the call. She’s right. I remember the years. They tried to have a homeless census back in the Mitch Snyder homeless days back in the late eighties and early nineties.
They literally did a homeless census, and they went to sewer grates on winter nights where the homeless tended to gather. You know, and Martin Sheen would kick them off so that he could sleep on the sewer grate to show solidarity with the homeless. The homeless guy is over there freezing his butt off while Martin Sheen is sleeping on the sewer grate! And then Mitch Snyder was with him. They took a homeless census because there was a dispute. These people were running around claiming there were three million homeless.
There were never anything of the sort, three million people homeless! So they were gonna take a census to prove it. They ran into the same problem. The homeless did not want to be counted for any number of reasons. Now, you may not have heard this, and I can’t attest to the authenticity of this. So I don’t know if this is an actual campaign that people are running or if it’s just an idea. But somebody came up with the idea that, for example, California, one of the reasons you take the census is for political reasons.
You find out how many people live there, what kind of benefits this state ought to get, calculate the combined taxes paid by the state versus what comes back to them in the form of benefits. With California being overwhelmed with illegal immigrants, one of the ways to deemphasize the power of California is for Republicans in California to refuse to take the census. To go ahead… Because the Democrats are gonna make sure the illegals do. Democrats in California are gonna find a way to make them count.
And they’re gonna find a way to make them count as citizens, I guaran-damn-tee you. So the idea here is for Republicans in California who don’t matter politically, don’t take it. That would reduce the counted population of California, which might then have a negative or deleterious effect on political power in California. Now, as I say, I don’t know if this is an actual campaign. It’d be kind of a Reverse Operation Chaos. I don’t know if it’s just an idea or if somebody has actually implemented this and is trying to make it happen.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Grab sound bite number 23. I was hoping to incorporate this sound bite interest our last caller who claimed she was a census taker. She didn’t claim; she was. She was a census taker. Her point was, in case you missed it, that if you go to certain parts of the country as a census taker, they don’t want see you. They don’t want to fill out the form; they don’t trust you. They think that you’re a revenuer or somebody coming along to invade their privacy and to find out where they are and what they’re doing, and so they don’t send the census form back.
This is a well-worn problem. There’s nothing new about it. Her point was that if you put a question here on the census for citizenship and you demand people answer it, that illegals aren’t gonna take it. She said they’re not gonna fill this thing out because they’re gonna have the same attitude, that they’re just being targeted, and they don’t want to be targeted. I was hoping… But her comments didn’t go in the entire direction I thought she was going. I have a sound bite here. Remember earlier in the program Trump tweeted that this business that he has dropped the quest to get a citizenship question on the census is bogus.
He’s not having dropped it. So I asked for a show of hands from people on the other side of the glass. Mr. Snerdley’s hand shot up, “I believed it. I mean, it had a DOJ source. Somebody Department of Justice, Department of Commerce said they were gonna drop the question. I believed it.” Trump tweeted (summarized), “I’m not dropping it. I’m not giving it up. We’re gonna get the question on the census in 2020,” and yet there’s a link to it on Drudge big as life. There are countless news organizations that are running that Trump has given up on the objective of getting a citizenship question on the census.
Trump has tweeted (summarized), “No way. We’re pushing forward. We’re gonna get it done.” I wanted to play for you a sound bite from CNN, ’cause they’re one of the news organizations that was blabbing to everybody (impression), “Trump gave up! Trump gave up! Trump caved! No citizenship question,” and then when the found out that wasn’t true, they had a little interesting chat about it. Dana Bash talking to the Justice Department correspondent Jessica Schneider. Question: “If you look at the president’s tweets, it’s unclear exactly what the administration is doing. But what is actually happening at the Department of Commerce with regard to the census moving forward, is it or isn’t it?”
SCHNEIDER: It is moving forward, Dana.
BASH: Yeah!
SCHNEIDER: We got that indication yesterday. It is going to print without that citizenship question, and it’s only the president that really continues to spark this uncertainty. He’s continued to tweet that this fight isn’t over, that he will still push to get the citizenship question on the census. But all other indications are that this battle is over, that the DOJ has backed down — and in fact, the census without that citizenship question has already started the printing process.
RUSH: So that’s where we are. Trump says, “I’m still gonna push for it,” but the printing process has begun. So we’ll keep track of this. It’s another example of fake news all over the way.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Middleton, Colorado. This is Ann, and it’s great to have you here. Hi.
CALLER: Hey, Rush! I just… It’s amazing. Your program every day is the best class I’ve ever taken, and I’m grateful that Trump is still working on the citizenship question, because my point is that John Roberts bent over backwards for Obama and the ACA, and then thumbed his nose at Trump on the citizenship question. And like you said, Trump is on his own with his supporters. He gets no help from any of the people you’d think would have his back after all this time and all he’s accomplished.
RUSH: I saw… I wish I could remember who tweeted this. Who was it? Oh! It was our old buddy Matt Schlapp, who runs GOPAC. American…? (interruption) Yeah, but what’s the deal in February? (interruption) What is it? CPAC. CPAC. GOPAC/CPAC. Yeah. Matt Schlapp tweeted that he would be in favor of impeaching John Roberts for lying at his confirmation hearings about supporting the Constitution, because John Roberts has gone around the Constitution twice. One, to rewrite Obamacare to make it legal — and then this citizenship question. I think that… I don’t know the chief justice. I know some of the others. I don’t know him. But he strikes me as a Never Trumper, a Washington establishment Never Trumper.
CALLER: Yeah. I think he is, and I think that he would be doing things that would support Trump.
RUSH: Well, look, it’s not the chief justice’s job to support the president here. But it’s exactly right. Obama… I can tell you exactly what happened here. Obama sends up Obamacare, and it’s not constitutional. The federal government cannot mandate this. This is the Fourth Amendment. The federal government cannot mandate that anybody buy anything! They can’t do it. It’s unconstitutional. Obamacare had a mandate that you buy health insurance. That rendered the whole thing… If we had an up-front Supreme Court that was not politicized, it would have been thrown out before it even got there.
Certainly, if it survived lower court challenges, the Supreme Court would have gotten rid of it. John Roberts got hold of it and rewrote it and reframed that mandate as a tax in order to say that the bill qualified as constitutional, because of course the federal government can levy taxes, and so the mandate was then reclassified as a tax. I’m giving you the really short, CliffsNotes version of this. He rewrote the mandate that we all buy health insurance as essentially a tax, and I know exactly why. He’s… (Snort!) If the Washington Post Style Section is on the block…
If a reporter from the Style Section of the Washington Post is on the block, he knows it. There is no way… This is my guess. It’s a wild guess, educated. There is no way that John Roberts, chief justice, wanted to go down in history as the chief justice who declared the first signature legislative act of the first African-American president unconstitutional. He didn’t want that on his legacy, on his resume, whatever. He didn’t want that at all — and he may have even been a believer in Obamacare. Who knows! The census question, citizenship? This was a punt.
The Supreme Court said, “Well, you know, we don’t really rule on cases where we’re seeing evidence for the first time. Lower courts do this and then we decide after there’s been a ruling. We don’t preside over cases where evidence is being presented for the first time.” This is one of the rationales given for punting the case back to the lower courts, and it’s just abundantly clear that the chief — and maybe the entire court on this — just didn’t want any part of this. You know the old saw that they read election results as well.