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By Marion Edwyn Harrison, Esq.
May 17, 2006
These first four paragraphs introduce and update the NOTABLE NEWS NOW discussion of the ongoing power play to transmogrify the Constitutionally created District of Columbia into a State of the Union or functional equivalent - translate: two more United States Senators and one more Representative in Congress for the liberals.
This issue attracts little attention outside the pages of THE WASHINGTON POST and the lobbying efforts of such as Common Cause, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and other activist leftist organizations. Representative Thomas M. Davis III, a Virginia Republican - yes, Republican - who represents a growing (and growing more liberal) Northern Virginia District, and who has Senatorial aspirations, at the moment is the principal proponent.
The present approach is clever. Give the District of Columbia a voting Congressman (who would have fewer constituents than all but one other and would represent fewer permanent residents than any); tie it in with a specially created seat from Utah (long, unconvincing story as to why); subtly - maybe not so subtly - further the basis for creating two new Senators. The statistical goal: 102, not 100, Senators; 437, not 435, Representatives. The real goal: Guarantee the election of three strong liberal Democrats, inasmuch as the District of Columbia votes more overwhelmingly, and consistently, that way than any State in the Union.
Read on for a little history, reprinted verbatim et literatim from August 26, 2004.
Not less than quadrennially - not coincidentally, in the Presidential election year - the media and the political parties combine to advocate, or at least give lip service to, the notion, contrary to the Constitution, Article I, § 8, that the District of Columbia should be a State of the Union or, alternatively, in all respects should be treated as it were one. District of Columbia local politicians, overwhelmingly Democratic, as is the local electorate, espouse the same cause continually, as though the cause had merit and responsible people in the 50 States were paying attention.
What is the District of Columbia constitutionally? It is the geographic and political situs of the Federal Government, independent of any State, with no vote whatever for its permanent residents (who, the Framers knew, were few in number, as, relatively speaking, they still are). Originally the District was 100 square miles, 10 miles square, the majority of its area ceded to the Federal Government by the State of Maryland, the balance (across the Potomac River) ceded by Virginia. When Congress briefly convened in November 1800, about 3,000 people lived in Washington. Tiny Georgetown was the “citified” area; the balance was farms, an occasional non-farm house or other structure, vacant land. The concept of “Washington” as a city, then as now geographically co-terminus with the District of Columbia, simply was the name to be accorded the District, honoring, of course, the First President, who, dying in 1799, never lived in the District nor saw it (in 1801) become the fledgling Capitol. The location was a political compromise, derived from principally geography and navigational accessibility, nothing to do with voting rights or alleged voting rights.
In 1847, with Virginia’s consent, the Federal Government, meaning Congress and the President, by statute retroceded that portion ceded by Virginia back to Virginia, in the optimistic if unrealistic expectation that the Federal Government never would be so large that it would expand across the Potomac. The area so retroceded now is mostly Arlington County, population more than 185,000, and a small portion of the City of Alexandria, probably less than 15,000 in its retroceded area.
To some extent during World War I, more extensively during and after World War II, Federal Government offices expanded, so that more federal employees worked outside than within Washington - Maryland and Virginia alone have more. Indeed, once one veers in the Northwest (“N.W.”) section of Washington more than a few blocks north of Pennsylvania Avenue or south of Independence Avenue the District is mostly nongovernmental. The total population of the District in 1960 was more than 800,000. Today it is less than 600,000 - a fraction of Metropolitan Washington (which, depending upon how one measures geographically, is in the 3.5 or so million range). Further, many D. C. folk (although the number is not reliably quantified) vote elsewhere and many, even by American transiency standards, are transient, many diplomatic and other international guests.
What voting rights do bona fide D. C. residents have? The patently propagandistic D. C. license plate - “Taxation Without Representation” - would suggest none. In fact, by virtue of Amendment XXIII to the Constitution (which few State legislators understood or cared about unless they were promoting three more Democratic electoral votes, inasmuch as the District votes more overwhelmingly Democratic than any State), they vote for President and Vice President - with a vote weighted via the Electoral College more heavily than that of citizens of 44 States! They also vote for a Delegate to the House of Representatives (who grandiosely styled herself “Congresswoman”) and by Act of Congress they elect a City Council and a Mayor. Notwithstanding the lopsided Democratic vote, XXIII was approved by Congress (albeit Democratic) and by the required State Legislatures mostly during the Eisenhower - Nixon Administration, fully ratified in 1961, just two months into the Kennedy - Johnson Administration.
What do the proponents of D. C. statehood want? Two United States Senators and a fully voting Member of the House of Representatives, in addition to the favorably weighted three electoral votes XXIII granted them and the local election rights they already have.
The District of Columbia Government is an administrative, fiscal and somewhat little-league corruption disaster, notwithstanding the apparent, if largely futile, efforts of the incumbent Mayor and a few - precious few - officials. Schools, welfare and other services disproportionately are a joke, a tragedy or both, depending upon which of the endless flow of revelations one evaluates. The District is said to have the largest number of city employees of any city its size and the largest percentage of any city its size or larger. And that considering most of the park, much of the police, much of the transportation (Airport, most bridges, many roads) and many other functions are performed by the Feds, along with a huge annual handout to the D. C. Government of non-D. C. taxpayer money!
But leave aside cost, corruption and incompetence. If only politicians - of both parties - would get sensible, what could be done? The precedent was set in 1846. Most of the District (except the monumental area along and near Pennsylvania, Constitution and Independence Avenues, N. W. - from a bit east of the Capitol west to the Potomac, from a bit north of Pennsylvania Avenue and south to include Haynes Point and nearby) , could be retroceded to Maryland, whence it came. The burden on federal taxpayers would be far less. All (of the comparatively few) residents voting in the present District could vote in, and as full citizens of, Maryland - with their own State Government, United States Senators, Members of Congress and the like, the same posture and rights every other American citizen enjoys. Further, the overwhelmingly Democratic vote of the District would find a convivial home in Maryland, which also (notwithstanding the present, and rare, Republican Governor) votes Democratic.
Transparent political posturing aside, why do so few politicians take this proposal seriously? In part it’s because the genesis was, or was perceived to be, racist. An example: The late Representative John L. McMillan, South Carolina, in keeping with Southern Democrats of the 1940s - 1970s, if perhaps a bit noisier, while serving as Chairman of the House Committee on the District of Columbia and otherwise, often opposed integration or any other act which would, or might, benefit the many Blacks in Washington (or elsewhere). Concurrently he was one of the few conspicuous proponents of retrocession. Hence, as often happens, the notion successfully was labeled racist, even though Blacks as citizens of a sovereign State, not dependent upon Congress for voting or other rights, would be politically just as equal as a citizen of any race or ethnicity in any State.
Because of the mislabeling, and probably because some D. C. local politicians have it so good now, Senators and Representatives, and Presidential candidates, too, naturally ran from the subject, leaving it to idealists and theoreticians to espouse.
Lest the reader wonder if the author is one of the foregoing, he will content himself by noting, as this piece began, that we shall see the phony issue arise quadrennially as well as occasionally betwixt Presidential years. Democrats would benefit with two United States Senators and a real Congressman. Those Republicans supporting it either have no clue or calculate it’s all PR. But politically it can’t happen. XXIII would need to be repealed, Congress vote to retrocede, Maryland to accept. It’s difficult enough to amend the Constitution. Nothing very controversial except the post-Civil War (1865 - 1870) Voting Rights Amendments XIII, XIV, XV, unpopular with Southern Whites, has gotten through.
The Immortal Bard is credited with having written: “The apparel oft proclaims the man.” So also in PR America the label oft proclaims the issue - and kills it.
[Addendum. Meantime, with a Republican leading the charge, liberals, and Democrats in general, are promoting the first step toward the functional equivalent of statehood: a voting Representative in Congress, to be followed in due course by two voting United States Senators.]
Marion Edwyn Harrison is President of, and Counsel to, the Free Congress Foundation.
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