Rep. Patrick McHenry: Please, Conservatives, Fill Out Your Census Forms!

Created: April 01, 2010 11:41 | Last updated: July 31, 2020 00:00

The conservative congressman from North Carolina, a constant critic of the census — one of the people who sounded the alarm about “politicization” when the White House mulled over the idea of letting Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel have a say over it — takes to RedState to battle census conspiracy theorists.

No one has advocated a direct boycott of the census but there have been calls to only partially fill out census forms – even though that would be a direct violation of federal law. Those calls are the problem. They feed a climate of mistrust in the census and need to be refuted. Unless conservatives understand how important it is to participate in the census, that climate will result in fewer conservatives being counted and hand Nancy Pelosi more congressional seats.

I and other conservatives have worked hard to fight off the Obama Administration’s harmful census plans. We fought off their attempt to run the census directly. We fought off ACORN’s attempt to participate and we fought off ill-conceived statistical sampling schemes that would artificially inflate the number of Democrat voters. We have been largely successful in keeping this count apolitical and it would be a tragedy if some of our ill-informed friends handed Democrats a victory at the last minute.

Some commentators have mocked reports of low census participation in conservative areas, but op-eds like this reveal that it is, potentially, a problem.