Columnist David Broder: D.C. should come to census senses

THE OPPOSING SIDES are clearly defined, and neither seems willing to yield an inch. The work of the government may suffer. What's needed is a compromise that will prevent paralysis.

No, we're not talking about President Clinton and his legal/political problems. We're talking about the census, a constitutionally mandated task of the federal government, which is now in jeopardy.

The dispute involves efforts by the Clinton administration to reduce the acknowledged undercount by using statistical sampling techniques to fill in for the people who have been missed. The White House insists the adjustment be made; Republicans in the House are just as adamantly opposed.

The president has said the issue is important enough to threaten a veto of the bill including census funds.

If the question is how to get the most accurate possible count of Americans, the weight of the argument is heavily on the side of the White House. The 1990 census missed 8.4 million people and double-counted 4.4 million others, a worse performance than 1980.

A post-census study, mandated by Congress and conducted by the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that if the old methods -- mailing out questionnaires and then dispatching an army of enumerators to hunt down the increasing number of nonresponders -- were relied on again in 2000, the result would be even worse.

The academy recommended that after 90 percent of the people have been reached -- by questionnaires or enumerators -- a statistical sample of the remainder be interviewed and the survey results used to fill out the totals.

That view was endorsed by Census Bureau professionals and by Barbara Bryant, the Republican appointee who ran the 1990 census. But this dispute is as much about politics as statistics.

Those who were missed in 1990 -- and likely will be again, if the same methods are used -- are disproportionately African-American and Latino, recent immigrants, urban, young and poor. White, middle-class suburbanites are easier to find and to count than people sharing space -- perhaps without the landlord's knowledge -- in a slum.

Democrats -- especially big-city mayors -- are eager to use sampling to fill in for those hard-to-find constituents. Republicans have much less reason to want them counted, because few of them vote for the GOP. Because census numbers determine the apportionment of seats in legislatures and the House of Representatives and are pivotal in drawing district lines, the issue carries heavy political weight.

But this is not just a matter of statistics and politics; it is also a matter of law. Congress in 1957 and again in 1976 authorized and then directed the secretary of commerce, who oversees the census, to use sampling techniques where feasible, "except for the determination of population for purposes of apportionment."

The House Republican majority filed a lawsuit, saying the administration plan broke that law. Last spring, I listened to oral arguments on the case before a three-judge panel in Washington. The administration's lawyer argued that the "except" clause was not a prohibition; that it meant sampling must be used for everything but apportionment and could be used for apportionment, in the secretary's discretion.

Two of the judges were openly skeptical; the third was mostly silent. But when the decision came down in August, all three ruled against the administration. A separate challenge, filed by a conservative group in Richmond, produced the same unanimous result on Sept. 25.

The administration's appeal is scheduled to be heard by the Supreme Court on Nov. 30. It is conceivable -- but not likely -- the justices will decide that the six judges who have ruled so far -- two of them Clinton appointees -- all misread the statute.

But before then, Congress and the president seem headed for a showdown on census funding. The Republicans want to block money for census operations after March, in order to assure sampling is dropped, and Clinton is threatening to veto the money bill if they do that.

The dispute -- and the uncertainty -- are disrupting the huge task of preparing for the April 2000 enumeration. Clinton, with all his other problems, does not need to be seen defying Congress and the courts. Much as I agree with him on the merits, I think the time has come to settle this fight.

Vincent Barabba, a former census director, has suggested to me that sampling be dropped for apportionment purposes in 2000 but kept in the plan and used to adjust the funding formulas for government grants to states and localities -- not a bad consolation prize for the undercounted constituencies.

Then early in the next decade, he would have Congress review the question -- perhaps with less politics in the picture than we've seen this time.

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