[Congressional Bills 110th Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
[H.R. 5599 Referred in Senate (RFS)]

  2d Session
                                H. R. 5599


_______________________________________________________________________


                   IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES

                              June 5, 2008

 Received; read twice and referred to the Committee on Environment and 
                              Public Works

_______________________________________________________________________

                                 AN ACT


 
 To designate the Federal building located at 4600 Silver Hill Road in 
      Suitland, Maryland, as the ``Thomas Jefferson Census Bureau 
                        Headquarters Building''.

    Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the 
United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. FINDINGS.

    Congress finds that--
            (1) Thomas Jefferson, as Secretary of State in 1790, 
        supervised the first modern census in world history;
            (2) the 1790 census was the first national census in the 
        United States and the first periodic census in the modern 
        nation-state era;
            (3) Jefferson urged President Washington to veto the first 
        apportionment bill presented by Congress on the grounds that it 
        was unconstitutional, and Jefferson's own apportionment formula 
        was adopted and used until 1840;
            (4) Jefferson's mastery of numbers and statistical analysis 
        helped alert the Nation to the importance of accuracy in the 
        numbers used to describe the society and pointed to methods 
        that later improved census taking;
            (5) Jefferson offered population corrections to the 
        European diplomatic community to more accurately convey the 
        fast-growing United States population, which had been 
        undercounted in previous census taking;
            (6) Jefferson believed in the importance of territorial 
        expansion and insisted on equal representation for the 
        territories that were to join the Union as States;
            (7) Jefferson supervised the first census in world history 
        that gave to the people more than it took from them, being 
        designed less to extract taxes or raise a militia than to 
        apportion political power to the people of the United States 
        according to their numbers; and
            (8) Jefferson's role in establishing a republic based on 
        principles of representation underscores the historical 
        significance of the United States census and the way the 
        Government views and governs itself today.

SEC. 2. DESIGNATION.

    The Federal building located at 4600 Silver Hill Road in Suitland, 
Maryland, shall be known and designated as the ``Thomas Jefferson 
Census Bureau Headquarters Building''.

SEC. 3. REFERENCES.

    Any reference in a law, map, regulation, document, paper, or other 
record of the United States to the Federal building referred to in 
section 2 shall be deemed to be a reference to the ``Thomas Jefferson 
Census Bureau Headquarters Building''.

            Passed the House of Representatives June 4, 2008.

            Attest:

                                            LORRAINE C. MILLER,

                                                                 Clerk.