With the House expected to debate a supplemental appropriations bill and the fiscal budget resolution this week, House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, said Tuesday that consideration of a GOP-sponsored bill that would add post-census local review to the 2000 census will be postponed.
"I think right now we probably won't get to it this week," Armey said.
Democrats have strongly protested bringing up the bill, arguing that Census Bureau Director Kenneth Prewitt has not had time to adequately express his objections, nor has the House Government Reform Committee taken the time to debate it at length.
Post-census local review would allow 39,000 local communities a chance to review the bureau's numbers before they are made official.
Democrats and the Census Bureau contend the review would interfere with the bureau's plans to conduct statistical sampling to produce census numbers for the purposes of redistricting.
Census Subcommittee Chairman Dan Miller, R-Fla., testified on behalf of the bill Tuesday before the House Rules Committee, but later in the day Rules Chairman Dreier said a rule for the bill would be delayed.
House Democratic Caucus Chairman Martin Frost of Texas, who sits on the Rules Committee, suggested afterward that Democratic opposition was sturdy and the Republicans could not pass the bill.
"I assume they don't have the votes," Frost said.
A spokesman for House Minority Whip David Bonior, D-Mich., said Democrats are "united" in their opposition to the bill, but are still watching for whether the bill may come up this week.
"We hope they are coming to their senses to reconsider a bill that would have made it impossible to achieve a fair and accurate census," the spokesman said of the GOP leadership.
Census Subcommittee ranking member Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., is expected to attempt to offer an amendment that would in effect gut the GOP bill and defer to the bureau on the local review.
National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Thomas Davis of Virginia, who has backed the bill in committee, said he did not know why the bill was pulled, suggesting the Kosovo crisis and emergency spending are already enough to take up.
"I don't know. We've got a lot to do," Davis said.
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