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Editors Note: This piece originally appeared in the July 31, 2017 issue of National Review.

Republicans dont have many legislative wins to show for their control of the House, Senate, and White House. They have, it is true, confirmed Justice Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. His confirmation, along with the thought of how Hillary Clinton would have used executive power, is enough to make a lot of conservatives happy about voting for President Trump last fall.

But Republicans hoped to have enacted major conservative changes in government policy by now. Congressional Republicans have complained over the years that their grassroots supporters have exaggerated expectations of what they can achieve. This time, though, the congressmen themselves have been disappointed. After the election, they too believed that Congress would quickly repeal Obamacare and then move ahead on tax reform.

That didnt happen. Action on health care has been repeatedly delayed, and the current betting in Washington, D.C., is that no major change to Obamacare will pass. Congress has barely begun to take up taxes. Legislation on infrastructure, which the president has consistently described as a priority, does not exist.

Republicans have been productive, at least, in coming up with competing explanations for their failure to change the laws. Many Republicans, especially those outside the capital and those who strongly support Trump, blame the congressional party for being weak and disloyal to the president. (A smaller number of strong Trump supporters insist that a few deregulatory moves by Congress, the Gorsuch confirmation, and Trumps executive actions, especially his planned withdrawal from the Paris climate-change accord, mean that everything is going well.) Often this criticism is couched as a defense of the president: If hes not signing laws, its the fault of Congress for not sending them for his signature.

Those Republicans who are more sympathetic to Speaker of the House Paul Ryan than to Trump most Republicans in D.C., in other words tend to blame Trump. In particular, they blame his tweets. When one of them becomes a big news story, it drowns out any other Republican message. Many Republicans in Congress complain that this White House is better at providing drama than direction.

Speaker Ryan has not himself pointed a finger at Trump: not in public, and not, to my knowledge, in private, either. He has noted that congressional Republicans spent ten years in opposition, first to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi in the last two years of the George W. Bush presidency, then to President Obama. Many members of his conference therefore have no experience of passing federal laws. The partys stumbles, he suggests, are part of its transition to being a governing party.

Yet Ryans own ambitious schedule for 2017 underestimated the difficulties. Congressional Republicans arent just out of practice at governing: They face a fundamentally new situation. From 2001 to 2007, they were very largely pursuing the agenda set by a Republican White House. The last time they were setting an agenda themselves, as they are now doing by necessity, was during the Clinton administration. They have not set an agenda that they had a responsibility to turn into law with the assistance of a Republican president since before the Great Depression.

At one tricky moment in the Houses consideration of health care, Trump tweeted a few attacks on members of the House Freedom Caucus. The controversy that ensued might obscure the fact that he has generally taken a very hands-off approach to the Congress. He has said that congressional Republicans, not he, decided to tackle health care first. Ryan has pushed for tax reform to include a border-adjusted tax to offset some of the revenue losses other portions of the reform will cause. Trumps aides have not taken a unified line on the matter, pro or con.

Trumps management style, unusual in a president, does not require public unity from his subordinates. Budget director Mick Mulvaney and Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin have taken opposing views in interviews about how much revenue a reformed tax code should raise. Mulvaney has also said that the administrations budget does not reflect its policy proposals which left some observers a bit flummoxed, since putting its proposals into budgetary form has historically been considered the point of the document.

The president does not engage or seem familiar with the details of policy, either. Many jobs in his administration remain unfilled, in many cases with no nominees yet submitted. For these and other reasons, his administration has provided his congressional allies with much less guidance than is typical.

Usually, a presidential candidate runs on a fairly detailed list of proposals and communicates to his party, the public, and relevant interest groups that he intends to achieve something close to its top items. That list reflects, adjusts, and solidifies the partys existing consensus. When the candidate comes from the party that controls Congress but not the White House, the list includes many of the priorities that the incumbent president beat back. If the candidate wins, his party defers to his list.

In the run-up to 2016, congressional Republicans decided to rely even more than before on their presidential nominees policy preferences. Senate Republicans made a conscious decision not to put forward a comprehensive agenda, so as to leave the nominee free to develop his own plans. Ryan tried to supply some content, devising a list of policies that he called A Better Way. But the lack of Senate buy-in, and the expectation that the presidential nominee would have a more authoritative platform, limited the seriousness with which House Republicans took it.

When Trump won, though, congressional Republicans could not defer to his proposals, even if they had been inclined to do so for a man many of them regarded as an interloper, because his campaign was so light on policy. His health plan consisted of a few pages of boilerplate, much of it dated. (The plan endorsed health savings accounts, for example, without taking any notice of the fact that President Bush had already gotten them enacted.) His own administration has not drawn on those pages. He ran on one tax plan during the primaries and another during the general election; reportedly instructed his White House staff to come up with a new plan that mimicked a New York Times op-ed he had read; and then oversaw the release of a plan that could fit on a 35 card.

During the last few decades our political system has come to rely ever more heavily on strong presidential leadership, and a shift away from this model of an overbearing executive may be salutary. It has, however, also been abrupt. Congressional Republicans have been left scrambling to figure out their own role.

Perhaps theyre blaming his tweets for their travails as a form of displaced anger over their new obligations. The proposition that the tweets are undermining congressional work does not really hold up. Nobody in Congress is going to vote against a tax bill because of something Trump tweeted about Mika Brzezinski. And its not as though the president would make a compelling case for Republican health-care legislation whether to the public or to holdout senators if only he could keep himself from using social media to boast and settle scores.

Whether anyone could make a compelling case for that legislation is a contested question. The health-care bill is hated by many and loved by almost no one, in part because it does not reflect any coherent understanding of what our health policy should be. That may be the kind of legislation one should expect when neither the Congress nor the president has thought through a policy agenda. The health debate has shown that moderate Republicans, especially, never worked out the implications of the partys loud opposition to Obamacare, which they joined with gusto. If they had, they might have realized that it was impossible to repeal Obamacare while also refusing to modify in any way its protections for people with preexisting conditions.

The same lack of forethought is already undermining tax reform. Republicans think they have a clear idea of tax reform because they share certain goals, such as lower tax rates and better treatment of investment. But those goals can be pursued in many different ways. How large should tax cuts be? Is it more important to cut corporate or individual tax rates? Or would the economy be better served by changing the definition of the corporate tax base? Should concerns about the trade deficit affect our tax policy? How should Trumps promises about child care be integrated with tax reform, if they should be at all?

Passing tax legislation will not require starting out with a consensus on all these questions, let alone on the more detailed ones that have to be answered after them. But Republican lawmakers are quite far away from a consensus on them, and the vast majority of individual congressmen do not yet have a strong sense of their own answers.

It is a mistake, then, to ask why Trump, Ryan, and the rest are not making more rapid progress on the Republican agenda. That question assumes that Republicans have a clear sense of what they want and are confronting an obstacle to the realization of their desires: that theyre not getting their way because [blank], which could be filled in with Trump is being a maniac on Twitter or Ryan is a weakling. But the problem is more basic. The main reason theyre not doing much is that they havent figured out what they want to do.

Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor of National Review.

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Why Can't Republicans Get Anything Done? - National Review

Would somebody please help me out here: Im confused, read the email to me from a conservative Republican activist and donor. The Russians are alleged to have interfered in the 2016 election by hacking into Dem party servers that were inadequately protected, some being kept in Hillarys basement and finding emails that were actually written by members of the Clinton campaign and releasing those emails so that they could be read by the American people who what, didnt have the right to read these emails? And this is bad? Shouldnt we be thanking the Russians for making the election more transparent?

Put aside the factual inaccuracies in this missive (it was not Hillary Clintons controversial private server the Russians are alleged to have hacked, despite Donald Trumps explicit pleading with them to do so, but rather those of the Democratic National Committee and her campaign chairman, John Podesta). Here, laid bare, are the impulses of a large swathe of todays Republican Party. In any other era, our political leaders would be aghast at the rank opportunism, moral flippancy and borderline treasonous instincts on display.

Instead, we get this from the president of the United States, explaining away his sons encounter with Russian operatives who were advertised as working on behalf of the Kremlin: Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent. Thats politics! And from elected Republicans, we get mostly silenceor embarrassing excuses.

Never mind that Trump Jr. initially said the meeting was about adoption, not a Russian offer of ultra sensitive dirt on Hillary Clinton. Weve gone from the Trump team saying they never even met with Russians to the president himself now essentially saying: So what if we did?

None of this should surprise anyone who paid attention during last years campaign. Trump Sr., after all, explicitly implored Russia to hack Clintons private email server. He ran as the most pro-Russian candidate for president since Henry Wallace helmed the Soviet fellow-traveling Progressive Party ticket in 1948, extolling Vladimir Putins manly virtues at every opportunity while bringing Kremlin-style moral relativism to the campaign trail. Worst of all, GOP voters never punished him for it. This is what they voted for.

My message for todays GOP is to paraphrase Barack Obama when he mocked Romney for saying precisely that: 2012 calledit wants its foreign policy back.

Nor was Trump Jr. the only Republican to seek Russian assistance against Clinton. In May, the Wall Street Journal reported that a Florida Republican operative sought and received hacked Democratic Party voter-turnout analyses from Guccifer 2.0, a hacker the U.S. government has said is working for Russias intelligence services. The Journal has also reported that Republican operative Peter W. Smith, who is now deceased, mounted an independent campaign to obtain emails he believed were stolen from Hillary Clintons private server, likely by Russian hackers.

Amid a raft of congressional and law enforcement probes into Russian meddling during the 2016 presidential election, its still unclear whether members of Trumps campaign actively colluded with Moscow. But we now know that they had no problem accepting the Kremlins helpin fact, Trump Jr. professes disappointment that his Russian interlocutors didnt deliver the goods. Forty-eight percent of Republicans, meanwhile, think Don Jr. was right to take the meeting. During the campaign, as operatives linked to Russian intelligence dumped hacked emails onto the internet, few Republicans stood on principle, like Florida Senator Marco Rubio, and condemned their provenance. I will not discuss any issue that has become public solely on the basis of WikiLeaks, Rubio said at the time. And he issued a stark warning to members of his party who were looking to take advantage of Clintons misfortune: Today it is the Democrats. Tomorrow it could be us.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of Rubios GOP colleagues completely ignored his counsel. Suddenly, Republican leaders and conservative media figures who not long ago were demanding prison time (or worse) for Julian Assange were praising the Australian anarchist to the skies. Every morsel in the DNC and Podesta emails, no matter how innocuous, was pored over and exaggerated to maximum effect. Republican politicians and their allies in the conservative media behaved exactly as the Kremlin intended. The derivation of the emails (stolen by Russian hackers) and the purpose of their dissemination (to sow dissension among the American body politic) have either been ignored, or, in the case of my conservative interlocutor, ludicrously held up as an example of Russian altruism meant to save American democracy from the perfidious Clinton clan.

Contrast Rubios principled stand with that of current CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who, while now appropriately calling WikiLeaks a hostile intelligence service that overwhelmingly focuses on the United States while seeking support from antidemocratic countries, was more than happy to retail its ill-gotten gains during the campaign. Today, just one-third of Republican voters even believe the intelligence community findings that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, no doubt influenced by the presidents equivocations on the matter.

I was no fan of Barack Obamas foreign policy. I criticized his Russian reset, his Iran nuclear deal, his opening to Cuba, even his handling of political conflict in Honduras. For the past four years, I worked at a think tank, the Foreign Policy Initiative, that was bankrolled by Republican donors and regularly criticized the Obama administration. Anyone whos followed my writing knows Ive infuriated liberals and Democrats plenty over the years, and I have the metaphorical scars to prove it.

What I never expected was that the Republican Partywhich once stood for a muscular, moralistic approach to the world, and which helped bring down the Soviet Unionwould become a willing accomplice of what the previous Republican presidential nominee rightly called our No. 1 geopolitical foe: Vladimir Putins Russia. My message for todays GOP is to paraphrase Barack Obama when he mocked Romney for saying precisely that: 2012 calledit wants its foreign policy back.

* * *

I should not have been surprised. Ive been following Russias cultivation of the American right for years, long before it became a popular subject, and I have been amazed at just how deep and effective the campaign to shift conservative views on Russia has been. Four years ago, I began writing a series of articles about the growing sympathy for Russia among some American conservatives. Back then, the Putin fan club was limited to seemingly fringe figures like Pat Buchanan (Is Vladimir Putin a paleoconservative? he asked, answering in the affirmative), a bunch of cranks organized around the Ron Paul Institute and some anti-gay marriage bitter-enders so resentful at their domestic political loss they would ally themselves with an authoritarian regime that not so long ago they would have condemned for exporting godless communism.

Today, these figures are no longer on the fringe of GOP politics. According to a Morning Consult-Politico poll from May, an astonishing 49 percent of Republicans consider Russia an ally. Favorable views of Putin a career KGB officer who hates America have nearly tripled among Republicans in the past two years, with 32 percent expressing a positive opinion.

It would be a mistake to attribute this shift solely to Trump and his odd solicitousness toward Moscow. Russia has been targeting the American right since at least 2013, the year Putin enacted a law targeting pro-gay rights organizing and delivered a state-of-the-nation address extolling Russias traditional values and assailing the Wests genderless and infertile liberalism. That same year, a Kremlin-connected think tank released a report entitled, Putin: World Conservativisms New Leader. In 2015, Russia hosted a delegation from the National Rifle Association, one of Americas most influential conservative lobby groups, which included David Keene, then-president of the NRA and now editor of the Washington Times editorial page, which regularly features voices calling for a friendlier relationship with Moscow. (It should be noted here that Russia, a country run by its security services where the leader recently created a 400,000-strong praetorian guard, doesnt exactly embrace the individual right to bear arms.) A recent investigation by Politico Magazine, meanwhile, revealed how Russian intelligence services have been using the internet and social networks to target another redoubt of American conservativism: the military community.

The entire Trump-Russia saga strikes at a deeper issue which most Republicans have shown little care in examining: What is it about Donald Trump that attracted the Kremlin so?

Today, its hard to judge this Russian effort as anything other than a smashing success. Turn on Fox News and you will come across the networks most popular star, Sean Hannity, citing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as a reliable source of information or retailing Russian disinformation such as the conspiracy theory that murdered DNC staffer Seth Richwho police say was killed during a robbery attemptwas the source of last summers leaks, not Russian hackers. Foxs rising star Tucker Carlson regularly uses his time slot to ridicule the entire Russian meddling scandal and portray Putin critics as bloodthirsty warmongers. On Monday night, he went so far as to give a platform to fringe leftist Max Blumenthal author of a book comparing Israel to the Third Reich and a vocal supporter of the Assad regime in Syria to assail the bootlicking press for reporting on Trumps Russia ties. (When Blumenthal alleged that the entire Russia scandal was really just a militarist pretext for NATO enlargement, Carlson flippantly raised the prospect of his son having to fight a war against Russia, as he did in a contentious exchange earlier this year with Russian dissident Garry Kasparov. At the time, I asked Carlson if his son serves in the military. He didnt respond).

Meanwhile the Heritage Foundation, one of Washingtons most influential conservative think tanks and a former bastion of Cold War hawkishness, has enlisted itself in the campaign against George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist whose work promoting democracy and good governance in the former Soviet space has made him one of the Kremlins main whipping boys.

And its not just conservative political operatives and media hacks who have come around on Russia. Pro-Putin feelings are now being elucidated by some conservative intellectuals as well. Echoing Kremlin complaints that Russia is a country which has been frequently humiliated, robbed, and misled a self-pitying justification for Russian aggression throughout history Weekly Standard senior editor Christopher Caldwell extolls Putin as the pre-eminent statesman of our time.

How did the party of Ronald Reagans moral clarity morph into that of Donald Trumps moral vacuity? Russias intelligence operatives are among the worlds best. I believe they made a keen study of the American political scene and realized that, during the Obama years, the conservative movement had become ripe for manipulation. Long gone was its principled opposition to the evil empire. What was left was an intellectually and morally desiccated carcass populated by con artists, opportunists, entertainers and grifters operating massively profitable book publishers, radio empires, websites, and a TV network whose stock-in-trade are not ideas but resentments. If a political officer at the Russian Embassy in Washington visited the zoo that is the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, theyd see a movement that embraces a ludicrous performance artist like Milo Yiannopoulos as some sort of intellectual heavyweight. When conservative bloggers are willing to accept hundreds of thousands of dollars from Malaysias authoritarian government to launch a smear campaign against a democratic opposition leader they know nothing about, how much of a jump is it to line up and defend what at the very least was attempted collusion on the part of a brain-dead dauphin like Donald Trump Jr.?

Surveying this lamentable scene, why wouldnt Russia try to turn the American right, whose ethical rot necessarily precedes its rank unscrupulousness? It is this ethical rot that allows Dennis Prager, one of the rights more unctuous professional moralists, to opine with a straight face that The news media in the West pose a far greater danger to Western civilization than Russia does. Why wouldnt a religious right that embraced a boastfully immoral charlatan like Donald Trump not turn a blind eye towardor, in the case of Franklin Graham, embracean oppressive regime like that ruling Russia? American conservatism is no better encapsulated today than by the self-satisfied, smirking mug of Carlson, the living embodiment of what Lionel Trilling meant when he wrote that the conservative impulse is defined by irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.

* * *

The entire Trump-Russia saga strikes at a deeper issue which most Republicans have shown little care in examining: What is it about Donald Trump that attracted the Kremlin so?

Today, most Republicans evince no shame in the fact that their candidate was the clearly expressed preference of a murderous thug like Vladimir Putin.

Such an effort would be like staging an intervention for a drunk and abusive family member: painful but necessary. One would have thought a U.S. intelligence community assessment concluding that the Russians preferred their partys nominee over Hillary Clinton would have introduced a bit of introspection on the right. Moments for such soul-searching had arrived much earlier, however, like when Trump hired a former advisor to the corrupt, pro-Russian president of Ukraine as his campaign manager last summer. Or when he praised Putin on Morning Joe in December of 2015. Republicans ought to have considered how an America First foreign policy, despite its promises to build up the military and bomb the shit out of ISIS, might actually be more attractive to Moscow than the warts-and-all liberal internationalism of the Democratic nominee, who, whatever her faults, has never called into question the very existence of institutions like the European Union and NATO, pillars of the transatlantic democratic alliance. Now that hes president, Trumps fitful behavior, alienating close allies like Britain and Germany, ought give Republicans pause about how closely the presidents actions accord with Russian objectives.

But alas there has been no such reckoning within the party of Reagan. Instead, the Russia scandal has incurred a wrathful defensiveness among conservatives, who are reaching for anything paranoid attacks on the so-called American deep state, allegations of conspiracy among Obama administration holdovers to distract attention from the very grave reality of Russian active measures. To be sure, the Republican Congress, at least on paper, remains hawkish on the Kremlin, as evidenced by the recent 98-2 Senate vote to increase sanctions against Russia for its election meddling and other offenses. But in no way can they be said anymore to represent the GOP party base, which has been led to believe by the president and his allies in the pro-Trump media that the Russia story is a giant hoax. It wasnt long ago that the GOP used to mock Democratic presidential candidates for supposedly winning endorsements from foreign adversaries, like when a Hamas official said he liked Barack Obama in 2008. Today, most Republicans evince no shame in the fact that their candidate was the clearly expressed preference of a murderous thug like Vladimir Putin.

If Republicans put country before party, they would want to know what the Russians did, why they did it and how to prevent it from happening again. But that, of course, would raise questions implicating Donald Trump and all those who have enabled him, questions that most Republicans prefer to remain unanswered.

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How the Republicans became the party of Putin - POLITICO.eu

Conservatives, by contrast, are known to believe wealth comes only to those who work hard. And thats just the way Jesus likes it -- despite all that stuff he said in the Bible, where he was clearly misquoted.

But a new study says men, people who live in the Northeast and gasp! Republicans are the most generous tippers.

That word arrives courtesy of Princeton Survey Research Associates. Its poll conducted last month reveals that 59 percent of Republicans tip at least 15 percent. Just 46 percent of Democrats admit to meeting that threshold.

The theory behind the discrepancy is not one of GOP generosity; its wealth. Statistically speaking, the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to be A) Republican and B) in possession of a Visa card that doesnt come with scary numbers in the debt column each month.

Republicans are also more likely to be men, who make $1 for every 79 cents earned by a woman. And men, needless to say, may be more inclined to try to impress others say, a pretty waitress even if they dont have a chance. (No, really. Shes not the least bit interested.)

Or at least those are the theories.

Still, theres reason to be suspicious of the findings. The survey sampled 1,000 people, but allowed respondents to declare their own tipping habits. Its possible that some inflated their beneficence rather than admit to a stranger that theyre actually cheap bastards in real life.

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Republicans tip better than you do. Maybe. - City Pages

Ever notice that as Republicans try to unwind Obamacare, they keep prefacing their arguments with why Obamacare is so bad? In the case of President Trump, he often talks more about how bad Obamacare is than how good its replacement will be:

Republican senators are working very hard to get something thats going to be really, really good, the opposite of the big lie that was Obamacare, Trump said in his weekly address Friday.

Well, there's a reason for that. Polling suggests that the Republicans' framing of the health-care bill as the only alternative to Obamacare is about the only way to make it tenable to theirbase.

Notice I said to their base. That's another huge problem for Republicans as they struggle to pass health-care legislation: It's not popular, even when compared with Obamacare.

A new Washington Post-ABC News polling shows that, by a 2-to-1 margin, Americans prefer Obamacare to the Republicans' plan:

Same with independents:

But when you frame this either-or question to Republicans, you get the opposite response:

Less than 60 percent of Republican voters preferring their own party's plan to Obamacare might seem low, given that Republicans have spent the past seven years campaigning on and arguably winning on repealing Obamacare. And it is.

But the data actually shows a much more enthusiastic expression of support for the Republicans' bill than when GOP voters are asked simply if they like it.

The Fix's Aaron Blake has documented how Republicans don't feel strongly about this health-care bill as it plods its way through Congress: A recent Quinnipiac University poll found that just 18 percent of Republicans strongly approved of it, while 11 percent disapproved strongly.

In other words, Republicans constantly need to remind their base why they're passing this legislation in the first place just to get them to like it more. And not even their base isthat on board.

Which leavesRepublicans with two not-great options:

1) They can pass a law everyone but their base dislikes. 2) They can oblige their base and be charged with undoing a health-care law that the rest of the nation prefers.

To get out of that Catch-22, Republicans have to convince the rest of the nation that Obamacare is as bad as they say it is and/or that their bill is actually the opposite of what voters think it is. Basically, they have to change almost everyone's minds about this legislation.

Trump is doing the front end (talking about how bad Obamacare is), but he's not helping to sell the rest of the legislation to boost its stand-alone popularity. In fact, the president is doing the opposite. He has given mixed support for the bill, calling the House's version mean and saying the Senate's version needs more heart.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell introduced a new version of the Senate Republican health-care bill Thursday, July 13, with added provisions, aiming to gain enough votes to pass the bill. (U.S. Senate)

Meanwhile, moderate GOPsenators are basically acknowledging that Obamacare has helped to insure people in their state. Their sudden vocalization of that notion, plus estimates that upward of 22 million could lose their health insurance over the next decade under the Republicans' plan, could be contributing to Obamacare's rise in popularity as soon as Republicans make a serious attempt to repeal it.

I've said repeatedly, I'm not going to drop you off a cliff,Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) told CNN recently.

Republican operatives argue that it will be their party that drops off a cliff if they can't pass a health-care bill, as unpopular as it is. A failure to address a conviction among the base of the Republican Party, seven years in the making, is infinitely more damaging than the ramifications of a three-week snapshot that starts well underwater because of partisan polarization, former top Senate Republican aide Josh Holmes told The Fix's Blake recently.

One side is going to have to lose this standofffor Republicans to pass a health-care bill. But nomatter who wins, polling keeps on suggesting that the Republican Party will pay a price, too. Which is why the more the bill's popularity sinks, the more you hear theGOP talk about Obamacare just to try to save it.

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Republicans' Catch-22 on health care - Washington Post

The writers of Article I Sec. 2 of the Constitution, which mandates a census every ten years, did not have satellite analysis and probabilistic sampling in mind. Neither did they imagine a United States withmore than 325 million people spread across the fourth largest country on Earth. But having created a system that ties representation to population, certainly they understood that the seemingly simple question of how to count Americans would bea political battleground.

The results of the U.S. census are far more important than most Americans realize. Census data are the starting point for redistricting and reapportionment adding and removing House districts from states as population changes dictate not to mention the distribution of billions of dollars in federal funding. Housing assistance, highway maintenance and Medicare/Medicaidare just three examples of programs that distribute federal dollars to states in the form of grants based on census results. Undercounting populations guarantees that over the next decade, states will be strapped for funding in these areas.

And that is likely to happen if Republicans in Congress get their way.Under cover of the non-stop Trump circus, they are quietly working behind the scenes to ensure that the 2020 census fails and fails to their advantage.

In its earliest years, census-taking was labor intensive. Census workers walked door-to-door counting heads. The relatively small size of the country and its limited population made this feasible into the 19th century. Explosive population growth after 1850 made this impractical, though, so the mail-and-return census form was added to supplement the work done on foot. As long as sending and receiving mail was part of daily life for most Americans, this worked well.

Which brings us to today. When was the last time you mailed a piece of paper? Your answer to that question might reveal why the census is nowhampered by the low response rates on mailed forms. Given the sheer size and density of the population, door-to-door head counting is not a workable solution either. So the Census Bureau has added new tools to its arsenal. It now doesBig Data analysis of U.S. Postal Service records, satellite analysis of housing blocks and statistical projection of population in dense areas where it is not practical to find every last resident. These are efforts to overcome a simple and obvious problem: It isn't easy to count every person in a large and populous country.

Ahead of the 2010 census, Republicansexpressed skepticism about the Census Bureau's increasing use of statistical methods to estimate population in cities. Taking their usual approach of dismissing as voodoo all things scientific and data-driven, they labeled the bureau's efforts a plot to fabricate liberals out of thin air. Their objections had little effect on that year's census, though, since Democrats controlled Congress from 2006 to 2010 and, of course, the White House after 2008. You'll no doubt be shocked to hear that their complaints died down when it became clear that the 2010 censusproduced favorable results for Republicans.

This time around, the GOP controls the White House and have House and Senate majorities pending the 2018 midterm elections. The Trump administration and Congress are working to ensure that the Census Bureau is required to do its work the old-fashioned way counting heads door-to-door, using mail-and-return forms or asking households to respond to an online survey while simultaneouslydepriving the bureau of the funding necessary to do so effectively.

If they get their way, and a cash-starved Census Bureau is prevented from supplementing its direct counting methods with the latest technology, the predictable result will be a census based largely on mail-and-return paper forms and voluntary online responses. As we saw in late-20th-century censuses, there will be a serious undercount one that particularly underrepresentsAfrican-Americans andHispanics.

This can happen because the Census Bureau is now led by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, a Trump crony and former leveraged buyout specialist who infamouslystruck a deal with Trump Taj Mahal investors allowing Trump to retain control after bankrupting the casino in the early Nineties. The Census Bureau has been without a director since 27-year bureau veteran John Thompsonresigned in May over the politically motivated defunding of his department.As with most vacancies under Trump, no replacement has been appointed.An interim director was quietly named in late June, suggesting that the position will remain unfilled.

And it gets worse. Few Americans, even in Congress, realize that the census is a count of population, not of citizens. Every man, woman and child in a given area is counted, whether U.S. citizen, legal resident or undocumented immigrant. Trump-era Immigration and Customs Enforcement crackdowns, thoughlargely fruitless, are highly likely to have a major chilling effect on non-citizens, regardless of legal status. Even under ideal conditions for the Census Bureau, thefear generated by aggressive and well-publicized ICE raids are expected to suppress the counts of Hispanics,immigrant communities and non-U.S. citizens.

It's a deceptively simple scheme: Trump and his commerce secretary impose rules on the Census Bureau based on the belief that science and data analysis are fake news. Congress squeezes the bureau's funding, reducing the quality of the work it can do. ICE threatens non-citizens with deportation to seriously dampen enthusiasm for participating. And then the results of the 2020 census will be based largely on voluntary responses to mail-in and online surveys, giving an incomplete and demographically skewed picture of the U.S. population.

The method for reapportioning seats in the House and, therefore, inthe Electoral College is sensitive to relatively small changes in state populations. Therange of predictions online shows that slightly different estimates produce different results. The last few seats assigned could go to one state or another based on a relative handful of residents. This process doesn't require a heavy hand to influence the outcome.

No one is eager to add yet another item to the list of issues that require attention right now, but efforts to undermine the census rely on the fact that voters and the media won't notice or care. We will live with the political consequences of the 2020 census for a decade. It is imperative we get it right.

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Why Republicans Want the 2020 Census to Fail - RollingStone.com