For most Americans, I’d guess that the story of a referendum in Puerto Rico wouldn’t have much chance to get through all the election hoopla. Yesterday the Puerto Ricans voted for statehood by a good-sized margin. Oddly enough, it seems they also elected a Commissioner who’s opposed to the idea. The resolution is not-binding on the American government, though. Statehood won’t happen until Congress approves.
I have a sad feeling that even if the debate was taken up in Congress, it wouldn’t focus on actual results for the people of Puerto Rico, but rather the fact that adding a mainly Hispanic State would be helpful to the Democrats in future elections.
From my point of view, we should force them to choose either statehood or independence within 10-20 years. We are losing too much money in income taxes otherwise, not to mention the economic efficiencies that would come from treating more people similarly rather than slightly differently.
I think the stateside politics are a self fulfilling prophecy partly. PR is already divided up into two parties. It would probably work out like Minnesota whereby within a decade or so their two parties would be for all intents and purposes absorbed into the stateside red and blue parties even if their current political outlook does not match.
But not if there is a strong GOP resistance to statehood, then that wouldn’t be true: you’d be guaranteeing a 4 or even 5-strong Democratic constituency for the foreseeable future.
Nothing’s going the happen. In order to have any chance of overcoming the larger political consequences, there would need to be a clear, resounding desire on the part of the Puerto Ricans to be a state. That didn’t happen yesterday.
PR citizens have voted down statehood by wide margins whenever the issue makes a ballot. It’s been pointed out that they have all the advantages of statehood without the downside (i.e., they have a somewhat greater degree of autonomy.) Don’t see statehood happening any time this century.
They’ve never voted it down by wide margins IMO. In fact, just like this week, they usually vote for statehood by a very small plurality. The trouble is, it’s never even a majority, because the rest of the votes are split between the status quo and some form of independence.
You can safely assume that many of the voters who voted for statehood in the second question nonetheless voted “no” as to whether the status should change. Once you take that into account, the results are similar to the previous polls.
As has been mentioned in another thread, the ballot, as it was cast yesterday, was confusing and a mess.
The ballot had 2 questions in it. A significant portion of those who answered the first question, and thus “voted” on the ballot as a whole, left the second option, which spelled out the status options, in blank. Those voters, combined with those who voted on the two other status options, make up slightly over half the total number of voters. The linked thread has various explanations and even a rough number breakdown on each voting.
And again, the governor who was elected, along with the new legislators, is/are from a party that opposes statehood, so the government-elect will not be interested in promoting it.
Also, like I mentioned in the other thread, there is no breakdown on how those that voted “yes” voted (or didn’t) on the second question, and similar for those who voted “no”.
So there is a possibility many who voted “yes” on the first question also voted for some other status in the second question, while some who voted “no” on the first question simply abstained from voting for one of the status options.
As to the last sentence, yes, that is correct. And both the local Senate and House of Representatives are now from the same political party as the governor-elect. The only oddball was the representative PR sends to Congress, which has voice but not vote. He is pro-statehood. It may be a bit… interesting.
To add: what did win was the first question, which asked if the voter favored the current status. That one had a margin of over 50%. But, that doesn’t mean those who don’t favor the current status want statehood.
And the non-linkage of first with second question was forced by reality considerations after deciding to place the questions on the same ballot: There being no way to physically prevent the same person for voting one way on Q1 and another on Q2 or leaving one or the other blank, and if you applied the theoretically plausible rule that only those voting “change things” on Q1 could then go ahead and chose Change-To-What? in Q2, you would have had an enormous pile of challenged ballots to deal with.
The original idea had been a two-stage process: First on one given date do the vote on Keep Statu-Quo vs. Change It. IF n=“Keep” then END for now, ELSE IF n=“Change” then GOTO Multiple-Choice Change-To-What? vote at later date.
Evidently that original system would have allowed people who voted for the losing proposition on the first stage to go ahead and vote in the second stage regardless.
When due to election-calendar political considerations ( = the Legiscreatures sat too long jerking a number of electoral legislation issues around(*), there was a promise to keep to hold the vote no later than the election, and people were unwilling to risk the issue dying on round one before Statehood could appear on the ballot) both stages had to be collapsed onto one same ballot, and everyone agreed there was not a court in the land that would say anything but that what you could do on the two-round scheme you had to be able to do in the one-stop form.
(*While valuable time ticked away hoping for a Federal Congress Bill on the issue to make progress and it was not until late 2011 that people got it through their heads that wasn’t happening. I knew for sure it wasn’t happening on November 2010!)
Y’all know the aphorism on making of law and making of sausage? This one was a beaut of a slo-mo trainwreck, y’all should have been there. Then 90 days pre-event the Election Commission came out with rules-of-adjudication that were different from what the actual Referendum Act said and by then it was too late to do squat, such as explicitly mandating a cross-tally to correlate Q1 votes vs. Q2, out of concern that trying to fix it in Special Session of the legislature would make things even worse (too many folks in the majority were unreliable votes).
They have fewer advantages–apart from exemption from federal income taxes for non-government employees–and less autonomy in most areas. Puerto Rican residents are American citizens, yet not fully and automatically protected by the Constitution (they get the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses, but only three of the ten Amendments in the Bill of Rights, for example, and only because we felt like it). They have no voting representation in Congress, no electoral votes for President. Federal funding for programs like Medicare and Medicaid can be cut at whim, even though residents of the island have paid into the system with the same payroll taxes that we have.
I tend to strongly agree with this. As long as the Republicans can prevent it from happening it will not happen. It’s like the DC problem of taxation without representation. The 'Pubs will never let it happen because it would give more power to the Dems.
Ironically, Gerald Ford proposed making Puerto Rico a State. That idea went nowhere.
They wouldn’t even go for giving the DC Congressperson an actual vote (for a total of 436) even if paired with adding one in Utah, which got a new one at the last census anyhow. Going back a ways, even Hawaii had to wait for decades until Alaska was ready, so they could go in together and offset each other in the Senate.
I don’t know many Hispanics that are republicans. My dad is one of the few that I know of. Nearly all the rest of my family are fanatic democrats, as are most Hispanics I know. So, PR would probably not be an ideal place for Republicans to put their weight behind pushing for statehood…just the opposite, and from a purely pragmatic perspective and leaving aside the racism angle.
Personally, I think we’ve gone long enough without having a new state admitted. If the Puerto Rican’s really want in we should let them, IMHO.