A bill has been introduced in Congress to make the District of Columbia a state. The overriding purpose, besides giving people who are subject to taxation some representation, is to increase our Senate majority by adding a fairly populated state to balance off some Senators from sparsely populated wastelands like Wyoming. I’ve read elsewhere, but can’t remember where and can’t find the link, that there’s also a movement to do it by constitutional amendment.
I’ve written about this issue in the past, and a quick Duck-Duck-Go search (Google is evil, use the Duck) leads me to conclude that, as I suspected, the right would attack any bill granting DC statehood as unconstitutional, for the very reasons I gave in my previous post.
My solution was for the Congress to redefine the boundaries of the seat of government to exclude all but the very center of DC, keeping within the district only the Capitol, the Supreme Court and the White House, and whatever other bits of geography that of necessity would have to be included in such a carve out. I’m fairly sure you could create a District that had virtually no “residents” who weren’t registered to vote elsewhere.
All of this still runs up against the fact that we now have possibly the most partisan and intellectually dishonest Supreme Court in our history, so I’m betting they would find a way to declare the statehood bill unconstitutional even if my fix, or something like it, was utilized. The obvious dodge is the one I suggested: that they would rule that the areas in question that were carved out of the District would revert back to the states from whence they came. That would mean a few extra Congressfolks from blue areas of Maryland and/or Virginia, but not the extra blue Senators that we really need.
Puerto Rican statehood would be easier; they couldn’t do much about that. But, personally, given the state of this nation at the present time, if I lived in Puerto Rico, I’d opt for independence. DC residents don’t have that luxury.
NOTICE: Comments still inoperative. I still can’t face the prospect of spending hours on hold waiting for tech support from the hosting service. I thought I could just disable some plug ins, and see if one of them was causing the problem, but I don’t really have any that interact with comments, so I don’t see that as being a solution.
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