In which South Dakota can’t actually do that

Voters in South Dakota approved a sweeping new government ethics law by referendum in November.  The South Dakota state legislature just overruled them.

Can they do that?

Yes and no.  A law passed by referendum is, in the end, a law; and laws can be repealed by the legislature.  A lot of states have protections against this practice, which is called “legislative tampering.”  South Dakota is one of 12 states that doesn’t.  So if you think the people can band together and pass a law by ballot measure there, you’re only sort of right; if the people’s will goes against the will of the legislative majority, as in this case, right out the window goes the popular vote.

But the legislature did more.  The bill, HB 1069, finishes off with the following language:

Section 35. Whereas, this Act is necessary for the support of the state government and its existing public institutions, an emergency is hereby declared to exist, and this Act shall be in
full force and effect from and after its passage and approval.

The declaration of an “emergency” does two things:  it makes the bill active immediately upon passage, thus preventing the ethics commission from coming into existence even temporarily, and it prevents the people of South Dakota from launching a new referendum to veto the repeal and restore the ethics law.

I don’t think they can do this.

Under the South Dakota Constitution, some kinds of laws are subject to veto by popular referendum and some are not.  Those laws protected from referendum are categorized as follows:

However, the people expressly reserve to themselves the right to propose measures, which shall be submitted to a vote of the electors of the state, and also the right to require that any laws which the Legislature may have enacted shall be submitted to a vote of the electors of the state before going into effect, except such laws as may be necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health or safety, support of the state government and its existing public institutions.

The legislature doesn’t have the power to protect a law from referendum just by declaring an emergency.  It has to fall under one of the two protected categories delineated in Section 1 above.  This was laid out in Lindstrom v. Goetz (1951):

 Only those laws which are not subject to the referendum, according to § 1 are subject to the emergency clause authorized by § 22. State ex rel. Richards v. Whisman, 36 S.D. 260, 154 N.W. 707, L.R.A. 1917B, 1. The same rule applies to municipalities. City of Colome v. Von Seggern Bros. Ludden, 56 S.D. 390, 228 N.W. 800. Whether a law or ordinance is subject to the referendum is a judicial question. If it is found that the law is not subject to the referendum, the legislative declaration of an emergency is conclusive. If it be found that the law is subject to the referendum, the declaration of an emergency is void, for then no emergency could exist.

The Legislature, in HB 1069,  invoked the second category of protection.  That’s what I don’t think they can do.  The interpretation of what counts as “necessary for … support of state government” in South Dakota has traditionally been pretty broad, encompassing laws designed to enhance or even redistribute state revenue.  But it’s not unlimited.  Check this out, from “Restrictions on Initiative and Referendum Powers in South Dakota,” Lowe, Chip J., 28 S.D. L. Rev. 53 (1982-1983), p.61:

I don’t think you can say, with a straight face, that eliminating the independent ethics commission is an appropriation bill or a taxing measure.  So their claim dies here:  they can overrule the referendum, but they can’t prevent the public from overruling them right back.

Update: (July 2017)  The South Dakota legislature has passed a law bringing a state ethics board into existence, but one much weaker than the one the referendum was going to enact.  Good-government groups in SD are preparing a new referendum for the 2018 ballot; I guess, even if the legislature claims it can keep the public from vetoing its law, it can’t keep the public from bringing into existence an entirely new oversight body, which they’ll no doubt kill in its crib in January 2019, and so on, and so on….

The Wisconsin Supreme Court gets home rule wrong and right

The Supreme Court made a decision in the Milwaukee police officer residency requirement case I wrote about, peevishly and at length, earlier this year.  Chief Justice Michael Gableman is still claiming the home rule amendment says something it doesn’t say; whether he’s confused or cynical I can’t say.

the home rule amendment gives cities and villages the ability “to determine their local affairs and government, subject only to this constitution and to such enactments of the legislature of statewide concern as with uniformity shall affect every city or every village.”  In other words, a city or village may, under its home rule authority, create a law that deals with its local affairs, but the Legislature has the power to statutorily override the city’s or village’s law if the state statute touches upon a matter of statewide concern or if the state statute uniformly affects every city or village. See Madison
Teachers, 358 Wis. 2d 1, ¶101.

“In other words,” phooey.  The amendment says a state enactment has to be of statewide concern and uniform in its effect.  Gableman turns the “and” into an “or,” giving the state much greater leeway to bend cities to its will.  The citation, by the way, is to his own opinion in the Act 10 case, where he’s wrong for the same reason.

But here’s the good news.  Rebecca Bradley, the newest justice, wrote a blistering concurrence (scroll to paragraph 52 of the opinion) which gets the amendment right.  She agrees with the majority that the state has constitutional authority to block Milwaukee’s residency requirement.  But the majority’s means of reaching that conclusion is wrong.  Bradley explains: by the home rule amendment’s plain text and by what its drafters said at the time of its composition, it is and, not or; for a state law to override a city law, it has to involve a matter of statewide concern and apply uniformly to all muncipalities.  Here’s Daniel Hoan, mayor of Milwaukee, and one of the main authors of the home rule amendment:

We submit that this wording is not ambiguous as other constitutional Home Rule amendments may be. It does not say——subject to state laws, subject to state laws of state-wide concern, or subject to laws uniformly affecting cities, but it does say——subject only to such state laws as are therein defined, and these laws must meet two tests: First——do they involve a subject of statewide concern, and second——do they with uniformity affect every city or village?

Bradley concedes that decades of Supreme Court precedent interpret the amendment wrongly.  So screw the precedent, she writes!  OK, she doesn’t actually write that.  But words to that effect.

I know I crap on Scalia-style originalism a lot, partly because I think it’s often a put-on.  But this is the real thing.

 

 

 

Home rule in Wisconsin: the or and the and

The Wisconsin Supreme Court is hearing arguments about a residency requirement for employees of the city of Milwaukee.  Milwaukee has a law requiring city employees to live within Milwaukee’s boundaries.  The state legislature passed a law forbidding cities from making or enforcing such laws.  Last summer, the 1st District Court of Appeals found that law in violation of the Home Rule Amendment to the Wisconsin Constitution.  The constitutional question is:  when can state lawmakers overrule the legislative decisions of cities and villages?

You might think this would be clear.  On November 4, 1924, voters in Wisconsin overwhelmingly approved the Home Rule Amendment, which added to the state Constitution:

Cities and villages organized pursuant to state law may determine their local affairs and government, subject only to this constitution and to such enactments of the legislature of statewide concern as with uniformity shall affect every city or every village. The method of such determination shall be prescribed by the legislature.

It turns out it hasn’t been so simple, in practice, to figure out what those 51 words mean.  In a recent high-profile case, the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld Act 10, Governor Walker’s signature legislation; among other things, the law forbade Milwaukee from contributing to its employees’ pension funds.  The plaintiffs argued that this provision violated home rule.  Michael Gableman, writing for the court majority, said it was fine.

This raises questions.  First of all:  if a state law needs to affect every city uniformly in order to supersede local government, how can it be OK to specifically target Milwaukee’s pension fund?  Here the exact wording of 62.623 is critical.  The law doesn’t mention Milwaukee:  it applies to “any employee retirement system of a 1st class city.”   The “uniformity” requirement in the Home Rule amendment has generally been understood very liberally, allowing laws which affect cities in different size classes differently as long as the application within each class is uniform.

To construe the amendment as meaning that every act of the Legislature relating to cities is subject to a charter ordinance unless the act of the Legislature affected with uniformity every city from the smallest to the greatest, practically destroys legislative control over municipal affairs, assuming that laws could be drawn which would meet the requirements of the amendment so construed.

That’s from Van Gilder v. City of Madison (1936), one of the first Wisconsin Supreme Court cases to wrestle with the limits of home rule.  I will have more to say about Chief Justice Marvin Rosenberry’s decision in that case, some of it pretty salty.  But for now let’s stick to the point at hand.  The law can be argued to pass the “uniformity” test because it applies equally to all cities of the first class.  There is only one city of the first class in Wisconsin, and there has only ever been one city of the first class in Wisconsin, and it’s Milwaukee.

That’s the argument the Walker administration made in defense of the law.  But the court’s upholding the law rejects that defense, and the uniformity clause as a whole, as irrelevant the question before it.

In sum, our home rule case law instructs us that, when reviewing a legislative enactment under the home rule amendment, we apply a two-step analysis.  First, as a threshold matter, the court determines whether the statute concerns a matter of primarily statewide or primarily local concern.  If the statute concerns a matter of primarily statewide interest, the home rule amendment is not implicated and our analysis ends.  If, however, the statute concerns a matter of primarily local affairs, the reviewing court then examines whether the statute satisfies the uniformity requirement.  If the statute does not, it violates the home rule amendment.

Thus:

no merit exists in the plaintiffs’ contention that the legislative enactment at issue in a home rule challenge must be a matter of statewide concern and uniformly applied statewide to withstand constitutional scrutiny.

Now this is weird, right?  Because what’s described and rejected as “the plaintiff’s contention” is what the constitution says.  Gableman replaces the Constitution’s and with an or:  in his analysis, a state law supersedes local powers if it’s either of statewide concern or applied uniformly to all cities.

Is this an act of wanton judicial activism?  Well, not exactly.  The phrase “as home rule case law instructs us” is important here.  The opinion marshals a long line of precedents showing that the Home Rule amendment has typically been read as an or, not an and.  It goes all the way back to Rosenberry’s opinion in Van Gilder v. City of Madison; and the reason there’s such a long list is that all those other cases rely on Van Gilder, which has become the foundation of Wisconsin’s theory of home rule.

Which brings us to the main point.  I’m not a legal scholar, but what the hell, this is blogging, I get to have an opinion, and here’s mine:  Van Gilder v. City of Madison was wrongly decided and has been screwing up home rule jurisprudence for 80 years.

Rosenberry’s first go at explaining home rule goes like this:

The home–rule amendment certainly confers upon cities plenary powers to deal with local affairs and government subject to the limitations contained in the amendment itself and other provisions of the Constitution. The powers of municipalities are subject to the limitation that the municipality cannot by its charter deal with matters which
are of state–wide concern and its power to enact an organic law dealing with local affairs and government is subject to such acts of the Legislature relating thereto as are of state–wide concern and affect with uniformity all cities.

The “and” between statewide concern and uniformity is clear here.  But Rosenberry also says that municipalities simply have no power to address matters of statewide concern:  its powers, he says, are restricted to “local affairs and government” as distinct from matters of statewide concern.  So what cases are the second clause (“its power to enact an organic law….”) referring to?  Only those matters which are not of statewide concern, but which are affected by state laws which are of statewide concern.  Rosenberry gives no examples of such a situation, nor can I really imagine one, so I don’t think that’s really the conclusion he means to draw.  Later in the opinion, he settles more clearly on the policy adopted by Gableman in Madison Teachers Inc. v. Walker:

when the Legislature deals with local affairs as distinguished from
matters which are primarily of state–wide concern, it can only do so effectually by an act which affects with uniformity every city. It is true that this leaves a rather narrow field in which the home–rule amendment operates freed from legislative restriction, but there is no middle ground.

and

the limitation contained in the section upon the power of the Legislature is a limitation upon its power to deal with the local affairs and government of a city or village. Care must be taken to distinguish between the power of the Legislature to deal with local affairs and its power to deal with matters primarily of state–wide concern. When the Legislature deals with local affairs and government of a city, if its act is not to be subordinate to a charter ordinance, the act must be one which affects with uniformity every city. If in dealing with the local affairs of a city the Legislature classifies cities so that the act does not apply with uniformity to every city, that act is subordinate to a charter ordinance relating to the same matter. A charter ordinance of a city is not subject to an act of the Legislature dealing with local affairs unless the act affects with uniformity every city. State ex rel. Sleeman v. Baxter, supra. When the Legislature deals with matters which are primarily matters of state–wide concern, it may deal with them free from any restriction contained in the home rule amendment.

Now the ground has shifted.  In Rosenberry’s reading, when the home rule amendment refers to “local affairs and government” it specifically intends to exclude any “matters of statewide concern.”  I can accept this as a reading of those four words, but not as a reading of the whole sentence. If Roseberry is correct, then the phrase “of statewide concern” is never active in the amendment:  a local affair is, by definition, not a matter of statewide concern.  I think when your interpretation of a constitutional passage means that part of the text never applies, you need to think twice about your interpretation.

What’s more, Rosenberry holds that the state has the power to override local officials on purely local matters, of no statewide concern whatsoever, as long as it does so uniformly.  If that is so, what does he think the words “of statewide concern” are doing in the Home Rule amendment at all?

To me, the amendment has a pretty plain meaning.  Something like a residency requirement for city employees or a fiscal decision about a city pension plan is plainly a local affair.  It may also be a matter of statewide concern.  The state legislature can enact a law overriding local legislation if the matter is of statewide concern and the law in question applies uniformly to all cities.  I think Rosenberry just plain got this wrong in Van Gilder and it’s been wrong ever since.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Antonin Scalia thought jurisprudence was more like math than it really is

I didn’t mean for Antonin Scalia to be a major character in my book.  I was just going to write about an interesting math snafu that shows up in one of his capital punishment opinions.  But then that led quite naturally into talking about “formalism,” which many mathematicians use (or think of themselves as using) as their everyday philosophy of math, just as Scalia used it (or thought of himself as using it) as his everyday philosophy of jurisprudence.

Legal reasoning is not much like math.  But Scalia sometimes acts like he thinks it is.  That’s what makes him an interesting figure to me.  He writes down arguments which he presents as derivations axioms — as if the words of the Constitution determined the resolution of the legal question, so long as you were willing to apply them methodically and impartially in the correct sequence.

But surely that’s wrong!  The words of the Constitution underdetermine a lot of really interesting questions.  Richard Posner:

Most of the cases the Supreme Court agrees to decide are tossups, in the sense that they cannot be decided by conventional legal reasoning, with its heavy reliance on constitutional and statutory language and previous decisions. If they could be decided by those essentially semantic methods, they would be resolved uncontroversially at the level of a state supreme court or federal court of appeals and never get reviewed by the Supreme Court.

I have written before about the Court’s decision that statistical sampling in the Census is in conflict with the relevant Constitutional clause:

Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. The actual Enumeration shall be made within three years after the first meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent term of ten years, in such manner as they shall by law direct.

Scalia’s opinion concentrates on the word “enumeration,” which he argues does not mean “determining the number of,” but rather should be understood in the more restrictive sense of “counting one by one.”  And he has some good contemporary sources for this reading!  You get a nice satisfying no-nonsense feeling, reading this opinion.  Then you start to think about what it actually says. Is Scalia declaring that constitution requires that the census count people one by one?  Can’t be — for the last fifty years the census has been conducted mostly by mail.   Does he think the census has to enumerate something, but it doesn’t have to be people?  Could it be anything?  Could it be “all property owners?”  Could it be “all non-atheists?”

Note, too, that when you fill out the census form, you write down the number of people in your household, then you fill out information for each person.  When the numbers are compiled, the computer, surely, adds up the numbers from each form to get an answer.   In other words:  a mathematical process other than enumeration-in-the-narrow-sense whose output is an approximation to the total number of people in the United States.  Kind of like statistical sampling.  Except not as good an approximation.

I don’t think we should consider that process unconstitutional.  It seems reasonable to consider it an enumeration, despite the inconsistency with some dictionary definitions.  Because dictionary definitions aren’t mathematical definitions.  A mathematical object is exactly what it is, and nothing else.  But when we read a word, we make a choice.

Scalia makes one choice: we could also opt for a more expansive but equally common-sensical definition of “enumerate” as “determine, to the extent possible, the number of,” which permits statistical sampling aimed at counting the “whole number” of Americans.  That “whole” is a word in the Constitution too, with as much binding force as “enumeration.”  It doesn’t appear in Scalia’s opinion.

Am I saying Scalia’s opinion in Dept. of Commerce vs. U.S. House of Representatives was wrong?  No; I’m saying merely that it’s not the kind of opinion it presents itself as being.  It is not determined by the text before it.  It relies, elsewhere, on an argument from pragmatism:  if statistical sampling is constitutionally permissible, then legislatures might authorize it, and the resulting partisan wrangling over methodology would create hard cases for future courts.  These are fair arguments, but they’re not textual arguments.  The argument admits that we make choices when deciding what words mean, and we should let our choices be guided by their likely consequences.

But no, I don’t think those arguments are obviously wrong.  It is pretty rare to find Scalia being obviously wrong.  Except in the following higher-level sense.  Scalia seldom concedes that the questions he faces are authentically difficult.  He — or at least the character of “Scalia” he plays in the opinions — lacks the humbleness appropriate to the task.  His habit is to present his conclusion as if it’s obviously right, the way a mathematical proof, once you understand it, is obviously right.  That is obviously wrong.

Update:  Commeter aaaatos makes a really important point, one I meant to address directly in the post.  He writes:  “what makes the legal system so useful to mankind is the fact that therein law is treated in a formalistic way as much as possible, i.e. as if it were mathematics.”  This points to another plausible account of Scalia:  that he didn’t actually believe law was very much like math, but felt it was best practice for judges to pretend to believe that.  That’s what I was getting at with the distinction between Scalia the person and “Scalia,” the persona he adopts as a writer of opinions.

Why pretend?  Partly because it enhances the authority of the process; partly because pretending to believe it helps us be “as formalist as possible,” mildly constraining the inevitably biased choices we make when we read words and try to obey them.

 

 

More is less: Ted Olson on Citizens United

I saw Ted Olson and David Boies talk about the Citizens United decision at the Aspen Ideas Festival a couple of months ago.  Olson likes the decision, and he was passionate and funny in its defense.  “The more speech we have, the better,” he said.  And who can disagree?  The antidote to bad speech is good speech, marketplace of ideas, etc.

It wasn’t until I was on my way home, esprit de l’airplane, that it occurred to me to think about the followup case, Arizona Free Enterprise Club vs. Bennett, decided a year after Citizens United with the same five justices in the majority.  In that case, the Court found unconstitutional an Arizona law that provided government funds to publicly funded candidates allowing them to match any spending by a self-funded candidate exceeding a specified cap.  Here the Court managed to reason that adding more speech, funded by the state, added up to less speech.  They argued that a wealthy candidate whose every ad was matched by an equally well-funded opposition ad would refrain from campaigning at all — the self-funded candidates so inconfident in the strength of their ideas, apparently, as to prefer silence to both camps getting equal time.

It’s pretty starkly different from Olson’s let-a-hundred-flowers-bloom philosophy.  The Court called the Arizona law a “burden” on free speech, though of course it in no way prevented self-funded candidates from spending and speaking.  Unless you take the view that free speech responded to is effectively cancelled or suppressed, precisely the opposite of Olson’s attitude.  I wonder what he thinks about this decision?  Is the right to free speech a right to be heard, or a right to drown out?

August 2015 linkdump

• There’s a new biography of Grothendieck, this one in French.  Any chance it’ll be translated?
• Let felons vote and let them carry guns — the ultimate left-right compromise reform?  Why not?  Everybody believes there’s some core of constitutional rights an American doesn’t give up, no matter what they do.  Felon or no felon, you have the right to free speech and the right to a trial by jury.  I think voting belongs in that inner circle.  I don’t really feel that way about gun ownership, but I get that a lot of people do.  And — purely as a practical matter — the typical felon who’s served his time is surely more correct in feeling he needs a firearm to protect himself than, say, I do.
• “Pinch my cheeks and call me gorgeous — it’s Raven!”  This panel has been floating in my memory for about thirty years.  CJ really likes the Teen Titans show that’s on Cartoon Network now, and watching him watching it inspired me to see if I could actually find an image.  Thanks, tumblr.
• Indietracks Compilation 2015.  As always, a great collection of songs.
• At some point I will try to find time to think more seriously about the claim by Josh Miller and Adam Sarjurjo that the famous Gilovich-Vallone-Tversky study finding no evidence for the hot hand in basketball actually found strong evidence for the hot hand in basketball.  The whole thing comes down to screwy endpoint problems when you average results of a bunch of short trials.  It has some relation to the perils of averaging ratios.
• Pretty sure this cartoon calculus book is the very one that was sitting on the shelf in Mrs. Levin’s 6th grade classroom, which I became absolutely obsessed with.
•  Do you think the most Shazammed songs are the most popular songs, or songs that best combine popularity with being a song no one knows the name of?  I like that you can see the country-by-country charts:  here’s Thailand, where they love Meghan Trainor, or don’t know her name.
• Good-looking conference at the Newton Institute about large graphs.

Scalia was right

As Caleb Crain pointed out way back in 2003, Antonin Scalia’s dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down Texas’s anti-sodomy laws, argues that the majority’s reasoning leaves the federal government without any constitutional way of forbidding gay marriage.

Today’s opinion dismantles the structure of constitutional law that has permitted a distinction to be made between heterosexual and homosexual unions, insofar as formal recognition in marriage is concerned. If moral disapprobation of homosexual conduct is “no legitimate state interest” for purposes of proscribing that conduct; and if, as the Court coos (casting aside all pretense of neutrality), “when sexuality finds overt expression in intimate conduct with another person, the conduct can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring”; what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples exercising “the liberty protected by the Constitution”?

I think Scalia meant to weight the contrapositive a little more than the direct implication, but hey, the two are equivalent, and it looks like he was right.

Update:  Just to give this a little more context:  It might look from this excerpt like Scalia is saying “gay marriage is obviously terrible and this decision would make it unconstitutional for Congress to outlaw gay marriage, therefore the decision is wrong.”  But in fact Scalia is responding here not to the Court’s main opinion in Lawrence, but to Sandra Day O’Connor’s concurrence, in which she goes out of her way to explain that her vote here should not be taken as precedent for establishing same-sex marriage as a constitutional right, no way, no how; while “moral disapproval” is not a legitimate state interest, she says rather vaguely that  “other reasons exist to promote the institution of marriage beyond mere moral disapproval of an excluded group,” and that these reasons, whatever they are, mean that laws forbidding same-sex marriage are constitutional.

Scalia’s dissent says, and I paraphrase, “You’re kidding yourself, Day-O —  if there’s no legitimate state interest in forbidding sodomy to same-sex couples while allowing it for opposite-sex couples, then there’s no legitimate state interest in forbidding marriage to same-sex couples while allowing it for opposite-sex couples, and you shouldn’t allow yourself to pretend otherwise.”  And he was right!

 

 

Evolving standards of decency

Samuel Livermore, Representative of New Hampshire, argued in Congress that the phrasing of the Eighth Amendment was much too vague:

The clause seems to express a great deal of humanity, on which account I have no objection to it; but as it seems to have no meaning in it, I do not think it necessary.  What is meant by the term excessive bail?  Who are to be the judges?  What is understood by excessive fines?  It lies with the court to determine.  No cruel and unusual punishment is to be inflicted; it is sometimes necessary to hang a man, villains often deserve whipping, and perhaps having their ears cut off; but are we in future to be prevented from inflicting these punishments because they are cruel?

The whole debate is amazing reading.  The words of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are almost scripturally familiar to us now; but it’s important always to have in mind that the document was cobbled together by committee, and that the precise intent, function, and implication of those words were as underdetermined and contingent in 1789 as they are now.  The Constitution is not scripture, and surely it’s healthy to put ourselves from time to time in the presence of people who were allowed to ask not only what the Constitution says but what it ought to say.

(Which is not to say that I think the Constitution should have specifically licensed judicial auriculectomy.)

 

 

The census will be wrong. We could fix it.

I have an op/ed in tomorrow’s Washington Post about statistical sampling and the census.  It boils down to the claim that by failing to use the best statistical techniques we have to enumerate the population accurately, we’re getting the answer wrong on purpose in order to avoid getting it wrong by accident, and possibly violating the Constitution as a result.  And that estimating an unmeasured quantity to be zero is a really bad estimate.

The book Who Counts?  The Politics of Census-Taking In Contemporary America, by Margo Anderson and Stephen Fienberg, was an invaluable resource for the piece — highly recommended.

One argument I cut for space involves Kyllo vs. US, in which the Supreme Court ruled, in an opinion written by Antonin Scalia, that the use of a thermal imaging device to detect heat coming off the exterior wall of a house, and thus to infer the presence of a drug operation inside, can constitute a “search” for Fourth Amendment purposes.  On the other hand, Scalia questions the constitutionality of statistical adjustment of the census, expressing doubt that such a procedure would still be an “actual enumeration” as required by the Constitution.  So, for Scalia:

• “Search,” in 2010, includes a scenario in which something of interest inside the house is not seen or otherwise sensed by any person or people, but is inferred by means of a scientific instrument that didn’t exist in Constitutional times.
• But “enumeration,” in 2010, does NOT include a scenario in which the population is not counted one by one by any person or people, but is inferred by means of a statistical instrument that didn’t exist in Constitutional times.

Is that a problem?

Update (4 May):  It turns out I’m not the first arithmetic geometer to weigh in on census adjustment.  Brian Conrad in the New York Times, August 1998 does in three sentences what took me 1000 words:

Human intelligence plus a little brute force is often far more efficient and accurate than brute force alone. This is why statistical sampling is the superior way to carry out an ”actual enumeration” of a large population. Just ask any Republican who relies on a poll or who takes a blood test rather than drain every drop from his body.