President Obama’s nomination of Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) as commerce secretary was intended as a noble gesture of bipartisanship. But apparently neither the White House nor Mr. Gregg thought enough about the fact that one of the consequential functions of the Commerce Department — not all of whose functions we would deem essential — is the once-a-decade census. For both parties, this is critical. The population count determines not only the distribution of congressional seats among the states but also the distribution of legislative seats within them and the allocation of billions of federal dollars. And, for most of the past two decades, Republicans and Democrats have been accusing each other of trying to cheat on it. The nub of the matter is the Democrats’ belief that the ‘actual enumeration’ called for in the Constitution inevitably undercounts minorities and the poor, who tend to be harder to find and count — and who also tend to vote Democratic. Republicans, charging chicanery, reject Democratic calls for the use of modern statistical estimation methods to correct for the undercount. Over the years, one of the Republican skeptics has been none other than Judd Gregg, who formerly chaired a Senate subcommittee in […]