May 12, 2016
It’s baaaack: DC mayor plans statehood push
By Tiberiu Dianu
In the midst of a presidential election year, the D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, intends to prepare a statehood package for the District of Columbia when the new administration takes office, irrespective of who wins in November. Supposedly, this is “a new front in the District’s long-running fight for equal rights.”
When asked about this, the former Republican presidential hopeful John Kasich opined that this would be “just more votes in the Democratic Party.”
Let’s try to figure out if there is any elephant in the room. At face value, sure, why would the DC residents not have their own representatives in the Congress, since they – don’t we all know? – pay (federal) taxes, go to war and fulfill other citizenship duties.
As a twenty-plus-year resident in the District, I say: it’s not going to happen. Not anytime soon. Here are several reasons.
The absence of political will at the top
Washington, DC has been a city dominated by Democrats, and a Republican-dominated Congress will never allow two Democratic senators and one Representative showing up out of the blue. In addition, Maryland and Virginia Democrat representatives (let alone their Republican colleagues) do not want a D.C. commuter tax imposed on their own residents;
The lack of viability as a state
D.C. does not have the means nor resources to sustain a viable territory or economy in order to protect its residents within its borders. That aside, if the new state would exclude a small federal enclave (as proposed, in an attempt to avoid a constitutional amendment), this would reduce its territory even further.
The non-existence of an independent budget
According to Article I of the Constitution, the Congress has the power to Exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever over the District. Although the D.C. representatives (including the current mayor) have threatened to pass budget autonomy laws, federal judges have consistently stricken down such initiatives over the years (see in 2014, for that matter), ruling that only Congress can act.
For the same reason, lawsuits seeking to grant D.C. residents congressional voting rights (in 1998) or seeking permission to levy a commuter tax on non-District resident (in 2003) were equally unsuccessful.
There is a good reason the District is not a state. The U.S. Constitution provided for a federal district under the exclusive jurisdiction of the Congress, and the District is therefore not a part of any U.S. state. Which means that D.C. should remain a politically neutral entity. And, since it’s not actually neutral, being forever dominated by Democrats, there is no ground to become a state.
The future DC (state) Constitution that the Democrats envision will certainly be a biased organic law, with provisions overtly against the current U.S. Constitution (such as banning The Second Amendment legal gun carrying, and other standard progressive issues regarding legalization of drugs and “equal marriage act,” to name just a few).
However, for those residents who still feel disenfranchised (myself included), there is an alternative solution.
Territory relocation
To reincorporate the DC territory (except a small federal enclave) into Maryland (as was done before with Virginia for the portion on the District on the south bank of the Potomac), and increase by 1 the number of U.S. Representatives; people would be represented in the House of Representatives, and in the Senate, Maryland’s two senators. Demographically, this is a fair solution.
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