Marco Rubio Is Really on One

Senator Marco Rubio has spent the last few days freaking out about what he thinks the biased media has been “freaking out” about—like the prospect of John Bolton starting a war with Iran, and the Trump administration undermining the U.S. Census.

Yesterday, Rubio tweeted this:

Today, at 5:47 am—an hour at which, speaking from experience, no mentally stable person is on Twitter—Rubio quoted Charlie Kirk, the young conservative diaper impresario, to complain about the lack of values being taught in schools:

And at 6:32 am, Rubio tweeted again, about another media “freak out” that he believes has been overhyped:

The problem with Rubio’s tweet—or at least one of its problems—is that the U.S. Census Bureau already collects citizenship data, through the agency’s more in-depth American Community Survey. But the citizenship question has not appeared on the official U.S. Census since 1950.

The 14th Amendment only requires that the Census count “the whole number of persons in each State,” and has no language about citizenship. The government uses Census data to determine how many seats in Congress each state should have, and to apportion billions of dollars in federal grants.

The point of this rule change isn’t to have a more accurate count of our citizenry, innocent as Rubio makes it sound. It’s to suppress responses from immigrants and people of color terrified of being targeted over their status—and disenfranchise more diverse states in the process.

It seems as though the teens have truly gotten into Rubio’s head. Little Marco!