Part of the reason for Congress’s exclusive jurisdiction in DC is the urban uprisings that struck Paris, London and other major European capitals in the years before the Constitutional Convention. The Philadelphia and New York City governments were also sometimes unresponsive to Congress’s concerns when the U.S. capital was temporarily in those cities. After those experiences, the Framers wanted it to be clear who was in charge in Washington if push came to shove. Perhaps that’s no longer a major concern (or shouldn’t be), but I think the view still lingers on Capitol Hill: “The whole reason for this city existing at all is as the site of the Federal government, and we should have the last word on what happens here.” The riots of 1968 and the corruption and rampant crime of the Marion Barry years further damaged the cause of DC statehood.
What about the people who are born there? Should they have known what they were doing, and have chosen parents in MD or VA if they’d wanted to have a vote?
What, are they incapable of leaving when they turn 18? When did DC become the American gulag?
You guys know that people lived in what is now Washington DC before the federal enclave was created, right? It was a town called Georgetown, and several other villages. Originally it was in both Virginia, and Maryland. Eventually folks figured out that the Virginia part was actually only Arlington, so they made Virginia take it back. Alexandria stole all the better parts of Arlington over then next century or so. The military kept a fair chunk of it, as well, for the Pentagon, Ft. Meyer, and Army Nave Country Club. And of course General Lee’s family left a hefty piece to become Arlington Cemetery.
Those folks do get to vote for Congress, except the guys in the cemetery. (Don’t know about the one in Illinois, they might still get to vote.)
Tris
Why should they have to leave? The right to vote for representatives to the national legislature is fundamental in our system. There’s really no good reason to maintain this inequality.
Since a constitutional amendment is essentially a dead letter, it seems to me that the best solution is for Congress to statutorily redefine the national capital district as the Capitol, the Executive Mansion and a handful of other federal office buildings, and let the residents be considered as part of Maryland for the purposes of voting for members of Congress.
In American DC, gulag leaves you!
Sorry…
A lot of people go through a lot of hoops to preserve DC not getting representation. Washingtonians should either move out or parts of DC should become part of Maryland even though it hasn’t been part of Maryland in a couple of centuries. But no one can answer why DC shouldn’t be allowed some representation in Congress. The best reasoning I can see is that it has always been that way and it addresses some fears that 18th century politicians had.
So for the people who are so opposed to DC getting representation, can you explain why a few hundred thousand Americans shouldn’t have representation in Congress? I’m not interested in why it was originally structured that way, but rather why you think it should continue to be so.
Here’s the thing: a lot of the people who were born in DC were born into pretty poor families. There is a lot of poverty in DC, especially in Anacostia and parts of the Northeast quadrant. And if you’re born poor in DC, you’re likely to stay poor - in part, because the public school system (with some exceptions) is fairly bad.
And when you’re poor, it’s hard to move. Yes, even if you’re only moving a few miles. For one thing, moving has costs - you need a car, or you need to rent a truck. You may need to take time off work. You need a rent deposit, utility deposit, and so on. If you’re living check-to-check, these costs make moving pretty darned difficult.
Besides which - the DC metro area has good, but decidely not great, public transit. If I’m living in Anacostia, I might be able to afford to live within a mile of a metro station. I could move to Arlington, perhaps, and get a vote in Congress - but it’ll be much, much harder to afford a place that’s metro-accessible. Maybe the bus will make up the shortfall, and maybe it won’t - but if it doesn’t, then getting to work can easily get prohibitively difficult.
Poor people lead complicated lives. Saying that their remedy for a lack of Congressional representation is to do a difficult, expensive, time-consuming thing that even educated members of the middle class view as a giant pain in the ass shows, with respect, a failure of imagination regarding the hurdles these folks face.
I’m not against it, although it seems that say, representatives in smaller states may be against because it creates new competition. There may also be financial reasons they oppose.
Wikipedia’s page, specifically the section I linked to.
This basically amounts to “Don’t like it? Get out!”, which every Doper knows (or should know) is a stupid argument in political debates. Why should they have to go to Arlington when Arlington (i.e. representation) should come to them?
How did a question about license plates become a debate about DC representation?
Because the license plate directly references representation.