Despite a crowded field seeking to replace the retiring Gov. Tim Pawlenty in 2010, writes the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, “Democrats have to like their chances given the lean of the state where President Obama won by 10 points in 2008.”

Control of state government is key to the parties’ fortunes as new congressional districts get drawn.

State demographers renewed their warning last week that Minnesota is “on the cusp” of losing a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Polidata projects Minnesota will indeed be one of 10 states losing House seats (pdf).

The Sixth Congressional District now held by Rep. Michele Bachmann, has been identified as a leading contender for elimination due in part to the irregular shape of its boundaries.

“The Census has a profound impact on Minnesota’s communities,” Klobuchar said in a statement. “It’s important that every Minnesotan is counted, so we get our fair share of congressional seats and federal funding.”

Bachmann might act out of self-interest here: her district tops some lists of those most likely affected should Minnesota be redistricted out of a seat in the House of Representatives.

“Talk about Big Brother,” Kent Lenhard told The Californian. “I read it over twice and thought, ‘Wow, I can’t believe this.’”

Lenhard says he won’t fill out the American Community Survey, a long survey sent to a random sampling of households by the Census Bureau each yeah. The paper speculates that Bachmann’s campaign against the census is Lenhard’s motivation.

In Ohio, advocates for low income and homeless residents are worried that Bachmann’s opposition to the census will have a negative impact on the homeless. If enough people follow Bachmann’s example, they say, Ohio would get less federal funding for housing, since the Census is used to allocate such resources.

“With all the cuts we’ve had in Ohio, this has become more important,” Cathy Johnston, advocacy director for the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio told the Dispatch.

Johnston said that a massive Bachmann-style Census boycott could jeopardize funding for crime prevention, winter heating assistance and health care funding.

The Rev. Miguel Rivera of the National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders tells National Public Radio that immigrants — legal and illegal — should boycott the Census because of past raids and deportations of immigrants.

“Law enforcement has been very effective in areas where the data of Census 2000 has been used,” he said, adding that a boycott would put pressure on members of Congress. “So if they don’t want lacking of funding for their constituents, maybe losing seats at the congressional level, then what they have to do is roll their sleeves and move forward with comprehensive immigration reform.”

That presents a conundrum for Bachmann, who has advocated increased enforcement of current immigration policy. “This is an issue of anarchy versus the rule of law,” she once told Bill O’Reilly.

She said during the 2008 campaign that illegal immigrants were “bringing in diseases, bringing in drugs, bringing in violence.”

But the more interesting twist? Bachmann doesn’t think the Census asks about citizenship. She told Sean Hannity:

Sean, you know the one question they don’t ask? They don’t ask, “are you an American citizen?” They don’t ask if you’re here on a visa or when it expires. We have no real idea how many illegal aliens are in our country. But wouldn’t you think, here they are asking every personal question about our lives, they could at least ask if we’re an American citizen? They don’t bother to ask for that. That’s why I think people need to read this census for themselves. If you go to my website, michelebachmann, you can read it.

But, as Think Progress pointed out, the Census has asked about citizenship since 1890.

Politifact, a Pulitzer prize-winning website, fact-checked Rep. Michele Bachmann’s latest claims about the U.S. Census and ACORN which have earned her the “pants on fire” rating for false statements.

Bachmann told the Washington Times, “Now ACORN has been named one of the national partners, which will be a recipient again of federal money. And they will be in charge of going door-to-door and collecting data from the American public.”

Politifact says that that simply isn’t the case. “ACORN will not be ‘in charge’ of going door-to-door and collecting data from the American public, as Bachmann said. The U.S. Census will be in charge of that,” it said. “Some of the 1.4 million people who get Census-taking jobs may learn about the job through ACORN. Workers who apply to the Census through ACORN have no better shot at the job than those who apply through any of the 30,000 other partners. That’s it.”

Politifact also notes that ACORN will not receive any federal funding to be a national partner with the census, nor will any other national partners.

MPR interviewed U.S. Census Bureau spokesman Steve Buckner who indicated that Bachmann’s plans to leave much of the Census blank would be breaking the law.

“It doesn’t help, I suppose then, to have a congressperson talk about these issues in the way that she did,” inquired MPR’s Cathy Wurzer.

Buckner responded, “We certainly are working with the congresswoman’s office here in D.C. and have already had a briefing with her to explain the rules of the census — why they are there — and explain some of the constitutional law. The Supreme Court has upheld the powers of the data to be collected.”

Bachmann’s statements also prompted the Star Tribune editorial board to issue a scathing response to her statements:

While Bachmann certainly is entitled to her outside-the-mainstream beliefs, she’s too often crossed a critical line. The two-term congresswoman from Minnesota’s Sixth District bluntly said she will not fully fill out the census form, a misdemeanor punishable by up to $5,000. Her census fear-mongering clearly could push others to do the same. What Bachmann is doing — on national television, no less — is encouraging people to break the law. That’s not right-wing. That’s not conservative. That’s just wrong.

Bachmann responded to the editorial with an email to the Strib:

I’ve received calls, e-mails, and letters of gratitude and appreciation for speaking up. For instance, as I noted earlier, the phones have been ringing off the hook in both my D.C. and district offices in support of my statements on the census and American Community Survey from folks throughout the country and Minnesota. But at the end of the day, all that matters is if I’m faithfully representing my constituents, the people who sent me here.

On Fox News, Bachmann spoke of how Census information helped the government find and detain Japanese people more than six decades ago:

If we look at American history, between 1942 and 1947, the data that was collected by the Census Bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations at the request of President Roosevelt, and that’s how the Japanese were rounded up and put into the internment camps,” said Bachmann. “I’m not saying that that’s what the Administration is planning to do, but I am saying that private personal information that was given to the Census Bureau in the 1940s was used against Americans to round them up, in a violation of their constitutional rights, and put the Japanese in internment camps.”

It’s not the first time Bachmann has raised the specter of such detentions: In April, she said she feared the Obama administration was planning “re-education camps for young people, where young people have to go and get trained in a philosophy that the government puts forward and then they have to go to work in some of these politically correct forums.”

Fox’s Megyn Kelly challenged Bachmann on her assertion, giving the Stillwater Republican a split-second of apparently shocked pause:

“We’ve had a lot of good years since then,” Kelly said. “That was a different time and a different era. We’ve had decades since then when, at least to our knowledge, this information hasn’t been abused. So how do you respond to people who say, ‘Look, we’ve been doing it for decades since then. The law is what it is and you as a lawmaker should know better than to break it.’”

Bachmann’s reply: “I think it is important that we are not a nation of law breakers. I’m just not comfortable with the way this Census is being handled…”

Apparently Bachmann’s comfort is more important to her than personally abiding by the law.

Watch it. (Via Minnesota Progressive Project.)

“I know for my family the only question we will be answering is how many people are in our home,” she said. “We won’t be answering any information beyond that, because the Constitution doesn’t require any information beyond that.”

“There’s great concern that’s being raised because now ACORN has been named as one of the federal partners… This is very concerning because the motherload of all data comes from the census,” she said.

But as the paper reports, Bachmann is “misreading” the law — and it could cost her family $100 per question left unanswered.

Via CityPages.

Even though Minnesota is gaining population at around the same rate as it did in the 1990s, it’s not growing as fast as some western and southern states. That means Minnesota could end up losing a seat in Congress after the 2010 census.

As of 2005, Minnesota was running over 300,000 people under the threshold to hold on to all eight of its seats in Congress….

Minnesota’s population grew by 5.8% between 2000 and 2005, but the growth was not widespread…. Thirty-four Minnesota counties are estimated to have lost population in the past five years, mostly in the southwestern and northern parts of the state.

Congressional redistricting has caused political havoc in the recent past, most notably with the Tom DeLay initiated plan to redistrict the State of Texas in 2003. “If Minnesota loses a seat,” Sen. Sheran’s newsletter notes, “it will lower its clout in Congress, as well as the electoral college, since its membership is based on the number of seats in Congress plus its two U.S. Senate seats.”