Teaching your children ethics in today’s world feels like an exercise in futility. What is a role model anyway? One thing I have tried to teach my children is, cheaters never prosper.
Unfortunately they’ve seen for themselves that cheaters do prosper. The kid who cheated on all the tests got into the good college, and paid for it with a scholarship. A quarterback who famously tampered with footballs won the Super Bowl. Russia helped Donald Trump become US president to undermine democracy.
So, okay cheaters do prosper. Donald Trump and the GOP cheat daily, and it seems no one can stop them. They are, right now, hard at work setting up their next political manipulation, adding to their tried and true gerrymandering, and voter suppression. They like to accuse others of their crimes, making it easy for us to guess what they’re doing. They unreasonably shout “voter fraud”, and we find out, with the help of Cambridge Analytica, they committed it.
Now, as they desperately seek any means within their grasp to cling to power, they’re planning to rig the census. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ falsely stated that, except for Obama’s 2010 census, the question of citizenship has always been part of the US Census. 
Not since 1950 has the question been asked. It was phrased— “If foreign born, is the person naturalized?” What makes adding the question of citizenship to the census a political move by the GOP? By adding it, the accuracy of data collected is compromised.
Donald Trump’s way of governing has increased fear among immigrants, making them less likely to participate in the census at all, and those who do participate are more likely to falsify information on household rosters.
Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution requires a census be taken every ten years, The data collected determines everything: the number of seats each state has in the U.S. Senate, and the House of Representatives, how legislative districts are drawn, and the big one— how many of the 538 Electoral College votes are distributed to each state is determined by the census. The annual distribution of $600 billion in federal funds to communities for schools, and infrastructure is determined by the census.
Again, States with large numbers of immigrants will be undercounted and lose on every front— representation in Congress, the Electoral College, and federal funds will be all be reduced by making an accurate count impossible. Civil rights groups have stepped forward to voice outrage, and several states have filed lawsuits over the citizenship question.
Maybe cheaters won’t claim this victory. They don’t always win. Jared Kushner tried cheating on his security clearance form several times, and that hasn’t gone well. Trump attempted to silence a porn star, but that didn’t work. Mark Zuckerberg sold advertising space to Russians who used it to spread propaganda, and he gave the data of 50 million Americans to Cambridge Analytica who essentially made Trump president. He’s about to pay for it.
So kids, maybe instead of “cheaters never prosper, we should say— sometimes cheaters don’t prosper, or better yet how about—karma is a bitch.
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<a href=”https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/inefficient/”>Inefficient</a>
A lot from Lydia 