Fellow citizens being treated as landfill
By moving just a few miles 16 years ago, I restored my constitutional right to representation in Congress. I did nothing noble to have my full citizenship recognized. I didn’t cross any international border. I simply relocated across the invisible boundary defined by a street called Western Avenue, from the District of Columbia to Maryland.
In fact, if you drive along Western Avenue, you will discern no difference whatsoever between one side of the street and the other. But only those on the Maryland side get to vote for a member of the House of Representatives and two U. S. senators.
The United States is alone among the democracies in flatly denying basic political rights to the people who live in its capital city. Paris, London, Rome, Berlin, Madrid, Lisbon — I could go on — all play a vibrant role in the national politics of their respective nations, and are represented in full. Washington, D.C., is treated like a colony, a distant territory, a political inconvenience.
The absurdity of all this was noted at a hearing March 22 before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform by Wade Henderson, interim president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and a lifelong Washingtonian.
“D.C. residents should not have to abandon our homes and move elsewhere to secure the rights of citizens enjoyed by others,” Henderson declared.
If the good residents of, say, Idaho had to relocate to Montana to get representation in the House and Senate, they would no doubt find the situation equally intolerable. Yet opposition to ending this injustice by adding the District of Columbia as the 51st state drives some members of Congress to truly wondrous levels of nonsense.
“D.C.,” said Rep. Jody Hice, R-GA., “would be the only state, the only state, without an airport, without a car dealership, without a capital city, without a landfill.”
Wow! Just imagine the patriots of 1776 chanting: “No representation without car dealerships and a landfill!” Later, Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., offered a friendly amendment to Hice’s comment, saying, “The only dealership there now is a Tesla dealership, which is I think a highend car.” That settles it, right?
Except that there are multiple car dealerships in D.C., as Rep. Gerald Connolly, D-VA., later pointed out in denouncing the “absurdity” of the arguments being mounted against giving Washington residents their full rights. Hice backed off that particular claim, but not his position. “If there’s a car dealership in D.C., I apologize for being wrong — I have no idea where it is,” he said. Thus the careful, well-reasoned basis for blocking full democracy for more than 700,000 people.
And if you think that is not a large enough population to entitle D.C. to two senators, then you would have to take senators away from both Wyoming and Vermont, which have smaller populations still.
But Republicans are ready to argue that the people of Wyoming (which happens to have two Republican senators) are “well-rounded” compared with D.C. residents. This entitles Wyoming folks to rights D.C. folks shouldn’t have.
I kid you not. Last year, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-ark., said this: “Wyoming is smaller than Washington by population, but it has three times as many workers in mining, logging and construction, and 10 times as many workers in manufacturing. In other words, Wyoming is a well-rounded working-class state. A new state of Washington would not be.” Funny, I find no provision in our Constitution that gives miners and loggers (or, for that matter, car dealers and landfill workers) special privileges.
Some Republicans have proposed “retrocession” as a solution, merging most of D.C. with Maryland, from which much of its territory originally came when the city was created in 1790. This would conveniently block overwhelmingly Democratic
Washington from adding two senators to the Democratic caucus.
That’s what’s really going on here, of course. Republicans will do whatever it takes and — as you can see — say just about anything to deprive Washington of statehood and thus maintain their overrepresentation in the Senate. Currently, the 50 Republican senators represent 41.5 million fewer people than the 50 senators who caucus with the Democrats.
The most innovative response to the retrocession idea came from the editorial board of the Baltimore Sun last month. “Why not merge the nation’s least populous states or territories when they are contiguous?” the editorial asked, proposing a merger between Wyoming, the 50th state in population, with South Dakota, the 45th (if you include D.C.). “Call it South Dakoming,” the Sun wrote, “or, better yet, Wyokota.”
Don’t worry, Wyokotans. You will get to keep your four senators. But pondering having your representation in the Senate cut in half might make you a trifle more sympathetic to Washingtonians who have no representation there at all. Partisanship is no reason to treat the rights of hundreds of thousands of fellow Americans as landfill.