Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/03/27/ca-sues-trump-over-census.html
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This is the Rebel Bear Flag Republic fighting several good fights at once. One of the many awful things about adding this citizenship question is that it furthers the noxious view that the only people on American soil who count in the eyes of the nation-state are citizens: screw the tourists and visitors, screw the permanent residents. And, hey, if you cross the regime screw the naturalised citizens too.
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My initial reaction was that I thought that censuses (censii?) were measures of the citizenry, but after thinking about it I think it’s more of a measure of the population at large. Given the Trump administration’s goal of using all sorts of information that previous administrations considered offlimits, I think California’s response is appropriate.
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How far can they push before secession becomes a real possibility?
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No big surprise. Gerrymandering, voter ID laws, criminal record voter suppression etc. Shove all this stuff through to lock in a one party system. Judging from the way Trump fawns over Putin, he’d be than happy with the job of president for life.
Just when we thought the west won the cold war.
The census is part of the Constitution- which calls for counting every person. Not every citizen.
But I’m sure conservative “Constitutional Originalists” who only stick strictly to the text will again find someway to jettison their standards when they prove inconvenient.
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I doubt Trump actually had anything to do with this. He isn’t that smart. His supremacist buddies are behind it, which is worse in many ways; they actually have an agenda.
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There will be another civil war before any states attempt to (illegally) secede. It ain’t happening.
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Heck, even slaves got counted (albeit at 3/5 of a person each).
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I would almost expect the current administration to propose that we compromise and count undocumented immigrants at a rate of 3/5… but I don’t think they’d voluntarily settle for less than entirely discounting (and deporting) them
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There’s literally no precedent or legal standing for secession; it would be essentially an act of civil war. I mean, those happen and all, but it’s…really about the worst possible outcome.
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#1 in agriculture, #1 in technology, $1 in universities. until the fed starts paying us, California can do whatever it damn well pleases.
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That’ll never happen. We’re the 6th largest economy in the world. Hell, agriculture alone in CA is 50 billion a year - we feed the country.
We can’t be allowed to leave.
Although some folks want to separate from CA (and part of OR) - which will also never happen.
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Not sure about Universities. Stanford and Cal Tech vs Harvard and MIT - given that MA is so much smaller- I have to call that for MA.
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I don’t know. On the whole, even UC by itself is massive and more influential than any other public university system.
“Collectively, the colleges, institutions, and alumni of the University of California make it the most comprehensive and advanced postsecondary educational system in the world, responsible for nearly $50 billion per year of economic impact. UC campuses have large numbers of distinguished faculty in almost every academic discipline, with UC faculty and researchers having won 62 Nobel Prizes as of 2016.”
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I’m sure in size and vast numbers of institutions- but Harvard- one University- has 75’Nobel’s according to the Wikipedia page.
MIT has 38 according to the Wikipedia page.I’m sure that Wellesley, Smith, BU, BC and Amherst must add a few more. Gotta give universities to MA. Especially given how many times larger CA is.
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One of the first thing that Harper did in Canada was go after the census. When you want to spread a narrative of needing tough laws to fight rising crime, or claim that a social program doesn’t work, it’s awkward when the numbers from census data prove you wrong.
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California’s Universities comprised three of the first four Arpanet nodes. California’s public universities are the reason the state is home to Silicon Valley. With all due respect to the nobel laureates at MIT and Harvard the Information Age belongs to Cali.
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Add to that the UC hospitals which are some of the best in the USA. Lawrence Livermore labs, the UC law schools, and of course research in general -
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Well of course they connected three sites in California and one in Utah when they were in the Goofy Prototype phase.
By the time they were serious, it looked more like this:
The history of the Internet has a massive survivor bias, where the lightning strike from the present back to the past ignores all those side-branches that never quite made it.
(My least Raspberry Pi could kick the ass of any of those systems.)
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