“does not prohibit the gathering of other statistics, if ‘necessary and proper,’ for the intelligent exercise of other powers enumerated in the constitution, and in such case there could be no objection to acquiring this information through the same machinery by which the population is enumerated.”
I’m no constitutional scholar, but even I know “does not prohibit” is a far cry from “grants the power for”. As far as I’m concerned, the government can go ahead and try to collect statistical data, but it has no authority to compel my participation beyond a certain point.
Oh, and notice how they misconstrue the logic behind the “necessary and proper” dictim to apply to the phantom “when necessary for governance” principle. However, “governance” ought not to be whatever the government gets in its mind to do. In this country, we have a Constitution to tell us what constitutes governance. It is those expressed powers from which certain ancillary authority “necessary and proper” to carrying out said powers arise.
How can it be “necessary and proper” to require people provide all sorts of miscellaneous information in order to fulfill the census power? It isn’t. Everyone knows it isn’t. What they’re saying is that it’s necessary to collect said information from the point of view of maximizing the efficiency of what government happens to be doing overall. But that’s not how it works. Overall governance is to be taken care of by executing the Constitution as a whole, and the specific powers therein. Any ancillary “necessary and proper” powers are to arise from the natural process of putting said specific powers into practice.
If it were the case that our federal government could do whatever it saw as necessary to maintain “governance” as a vague and abstract principle (rather than a series of distinct powers), there would be no need for a Constitution.