theholtsite

Census Law

(a) Whoever, being over eighteen years of age, refuses or willfully neglects, when requested by the Secretary, or by any other authorized officer or employee of the Department of Commerce or bureau or agency thereof acting under the instructions of the Secretary or authorized officer, to answer, to the best of his knowledge, any of the questions on any schedule submitted to him in connection with any census or survey provided for by subchapters I, II, IV, and V of chapter 5 of this title, applying to himself or to the family to which he belongs or is related, or to the farm or farms of which he or his family is the occupant, shall be fined not more than $100.

(b) Whoever, when answering questions described in subsection (a) of this section, and under the conditions or circumstances described in such subsection, willfully gives any answer that is false, shall be fined not more than $500.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. The Constitution guarantees census-takers to COUNT people, not collect any amount of personal information that they choose.

I do seek to obey the law, but is this law simply unconstitutional? What do you think?

  1. Ben Holt

    That’s a good point. Still, what if the courts are wrong, or corrupt, or bad? Some laws move into the domain of civil disobedience. Although this type of law is very rare, it’s worth mentioning.

    But I agree that it’s not good to disobey a law simply because we don’t like it or don’t feel like it.

  2. Marcus

    Technically I think any law passed is legal until proven otherwise in the court system. The point of the courts is to determine if laws are unconstitutional or not…so citizens can’t just choose not to obey laws based on their own interpretations of constitutionality. So I would say that we’d have to follow it until we can prove the law unconstitutional in a court.

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