According to the population formula used by Congress to distribute House seats every 10 years, California is currently on the bubble in 2020, on the verge of losing a seat for the first time in its history.

Trump’s revenge on #California: The Census https://t.co/TmYsA1xBtb

— Bill Postmus (@billpostmus) January 17, 2018

...Fear is rising among Democrats over the prospect that President Donald Trump’s hard line on immigration might ultimately cost California a seat in Congress during the upcoming round of reapportionment.

Top Democrats here are increasingly worried the administration’s restrictive policies — and the potential inclusion of a question about citizenship on the next U.S. census — could scare whole swaths of California’s large immigrant population away from participating in the decennial count, resulting in an undercount that could cost the state billions of dollars in federal funding over the next decade and, perhaps, the loss of one of its 53 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives....

Buried lede:https://t.co/QbMEzScFry pic.twitter.com/RsU3wAynYW

— Joel Engel (@joelengel) January 19, 2018

LGBTQ Advocates Demand That Donald Trump Compiles A Registry Of All Gay Americans

This is really happening. https://t.co/pU4pC0DnOR

— The Federalist (@FDRLST) April 6, 2017

Imagine a scenario in which the Trump administration called for all Americans to register their sexual preferences with the government. Gay, straight, bi, trans, and every other permutation of sexual desire and identity would be compiled and cross-referenced by government officials. Lying or failing to answer the question would be a violation of federal law, subject to fines. The government would know precisely what is going on in your bedroom, and in the bedrooms of your fellow citizens across the nation.

That sounds like a lefty fever dream, a dystopian vision of Trumpian persecution.

Instead, it is the policy some LGBT advocates are clamoring for and were disappointed not to have received last week. Rather than celebrating the protection of their privacy, the National LGBTQ Taskforce released a press statement condemning the administration’s decision to continue the existing policy of minding their own business.

According to a report in The New York Times, the Census Bureau has been directed to change the wording of its questions relating to health care coverage so that they can no longer be checked against the past three decades of data.

◼ Yet Another Crazy Conservative Conspiracy Theory Proven Correct - Noah Rothman/Mediaite

In 2009, in the earliest weeks of President Barack Obama‘s administration, the White House made the controversial decision to take the unprecedented step of moving the Census Bureau from control of the commerce secretary over to the White House ahead of the decennial 2010 census.

Conservatives sounded alarm bells. “It takes something that is supposedly apolitical like the census, and gives it to a guy who is infamously political,” said Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT) of then White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

“Requiring the Census director to report directly to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is a shamefully transparent attempt by your administration to politicize the Census Bureau and manipulate the 2010 Census,” read a letter addressed to Obama authored by Reps. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Patrick McHenry (R-NC)....

According to a report in The New York Times, the Census Bureau has been directed to change the wording of its questions relating to health care coverage so that they can no longer be checked against the past three decades of data. According to the nonpartisan analysts and census officials The Times spoke with, this change will make it nearly impossible to accurately assess the effects of the Affordable Care Act has had on the number of Americans who have health insurance....

Policy analysts and columnists, who are not reflexively friendly to conservative causes, called the debasement of a formerly neutral agency to achieve a political end “insane” and “inexcusable.”

And, thus, another crazy conservative conspiracy theory is proven to not be so crazy after all.