Currently what are the requirements for a province or territory to become a new state of the USA? Could Puerto Rico end it’s finance woes by joining up? Could a dissatisfied nation like Greece leave the European Union and become our 51st state?
Artice IV, Section 3 says only that “New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union.”
Congress can bring in any areas outside the current 50 states it so desires. It’s a profoundly political decision requiring both houses to approve so historically only obvious and popular candidates have been included.
That’s the GQ answer. Any specifics are best left to GD.
An act of Congress is needed to admit the new state. The possibility is discussed a lot in Puerto Rico, but so far, every poll on the question has favored maintaining the status quo. Even if they decided they wanted to be a state, though, that’s still no guarantee that Congress would agree. For Greece, meanwhile, there’d be almost no chance of Congress admitting them.
There is a legal theory that Canada or one of its provinces could join without an act of Congress, but that legal theory is based on a clause in the Articles of Confederation, which is usually regarded as having been completely superceded by the Constitution. And in any event, it only applies to Canada specifically.
And I’m not sure what becoming a state would have to do with PR’s finances. They’re already a part of the country and can thus get some measure of federal aid… They might perhaps get more as a state, but that’s hardly a given.
My understanding is that states have enough sovereignty to declare bankruptcy on their own terms, while PR is wholly dependent on acts of Congress for what powers it has, limiting its options.
A lot of the residents of the District of Columbia wish they could be a state, but there’s no way Republicans would accept two more guaranteed Democratic Senators and a Democratic Representative.
The District of Columbia is yet another can of worms. It would actually be easier to admit Greece as a state than the District of Columbia, since the existence of the District is mandated by the Constitution, and thus its admittance would require an amendment, not a mere act.
Not if they whittled the federal district down to just a few blocks around the White House and the Capitol.
Somewhat ironically that would be complicated by the Twenth-third Amendment, which was of course intended to increase the political rights of the inhabitants of the District of Columbia:
So, the “ceremonial core” federal district that’s sometimes proposed–the White House, Capitol, and National Mall, leaving the rest of D.C. to become the State of New Columbia–would get three electoral votes (the minimum number of electoral votes a state can get), even though the only actual residents of such a territory would presumably be the First Family in the White House.
Although, that could be bypassed with a simple (non-amendment) law, since the amendment says that the electors shall be appointed “in such manner as the Congress may direct”. So Congress could direct that DC’s electors must be chosen so as to agree with the majority of other electors, or some such. OK, the actual law would have to be a bit more complicated, since electors aren’t officially associated with candidates, but it could be done.
What about all the homeless people who live there? Not all of them vote, but they certainly can’t be denied the right to vote.
Warnign, long, divided in three headings:
I. Admissions of States
Admission of a state is as mentioned a straight Act of Congress, with some minor variants on procedural details e.g. whether the decision has already been made and is to be simply ratified (Admission Act) or is yet to be consulted and terms worked out (Enabling Act).
Anti-statehood propagandists here in PR and their stateside allies will at times spread around UL’s about supermajority vote requirements or ratification by states as if it were a constitutional amendment, just to confuse things, but really as mentioned it is fundamentally a straight political decision requiring the same votes as any regular bill.
II. DC Statehood
The transformation of DC into New Columbia could be achieved without creating a phantom population – the elected officials and their spouses and dependents remain legally registered voters* of their home states*, NOT of the District, during their terms. You could seek to gerrymander the Federal enclave so it contains no civilian permanent housing and legislate that any military family housed in any bases within the Federal Enclave in turn also retain the voter registration of their last non-DC domicile. The homeless could be registered at the address of the nearest shelter or soup kitchen in nonfederal jurisdiction.
Also I have the feeling that once the State of New Columbia or Commonwealth of Potomac or whatever you call it is an established fact of life, refersal of the now-moot DC electoral vote amendment would be noncontroversial and the required 39 state legislatures would ratify pronto.
III. Puerto Rico. LONG.
In terms of strict political mechanics Puerto Rico is, contrary to many people’s supposition, already nearly a state. Virtually every facet of Federal/Local relation and jurisdiction between the agencies of the Federal Government and those of the Commonwealthis run in practice identically to how it is run in any of the 50. It is even within the customs zone, unlike most of the other insular territories, has no labor or immigration law special treatment unlike those in the far Pacific, and the US Court for San Juan is an Article III District Court.
The major differences in practice are fiscal - a number of major Federal program funds are “capped” to a maximum or get throttled past after a certain point; this has contributed to the local fiscal issues because meanwhile we do get stuck with mandates to comply with Federal provisions in public serices, but they may not be fully funded so we have to either tax or borrow to comply (Medicaid is a monster on that aspect). This leads to that the tax load in PR for the regular FT employed citizen can be higher than stateside because, sure, he may not pay Federal Individual Income Tax but he gets socked with a myriad other local and federal taxes, excises, tariffs, fees, assessments, levies etc.
Statehood for PR would *strictly *necessitate nothing more than legislating for a phase-in of the Federal Income Tax and equalization of those funding formulae that require it, and either expansion or reapportionment of the House. Even the English version of the current PR Constitution could stay as-is and we’d be the 5th “Commonwealth” state. We’d only have to at some point add an amendment to cover presidential elections and apportionment of Congressional districts. Obviously, in the Real World it would also require transitional legislation to sustain stability through the phase-in of the new tax system and budget-neutralize the whole spectacle, and you can almost see the different factions stateside trying to add whatever is their pet rider to it, however unasked for.
Anti-statehood propagandists like to bring up the issue of the English language but of course that also bumps into the reality that there is NO national official language and in any case if there were it would be the language of government-to-government business, and our financial and trade sectors already function mainly in English since the Fed, FDIC, FTC, etc. rule them here. But I could again see Tea Partiers filibustering on that just to be their usual prickish selves.
One very interesting twist in the PR status issue happened earlier this June with a SCOTUS decision PR v Sanchez Valle, wherein the question was if the separate-sovereigns provision to the Double Jeopardy clause applies in Puerto Rico when charging someone for the same crime in Federal and local courts. In this the Court (disappointingly for many) reaffirmed the Insular Cases doctrine, and following up on that ruled that the 1952 Commonwealth Constitution did NOT effect a recognition of sovereignty but merely conceded a limited administrative Home Rule, and PR continued to be a dependency of the US, holder of ALL the legal sovereignty. This case was unusual in that the US Solicitor General filed an Amicus brief explicitly supporting that position, a change from decades of Executive Branch hemmin’ an’ hawin’ about just how autonomous was this political contraption.
The political effect has been to create an awareness that the statu-quo has been declared intrinsecally non-permanent and subject to political legislation, this has heartened followers of both statehood and independence, as well as those in the pro-statu-quo party who have been arguing all along that they needed to evolve into something *really *autonomous, not just a good enough fake.
Pleonast: PR was on the same footing as the rest of the states until 1984 when the US Bankruptcy Code was amended, and since which amendment the constituent states *and only *the constituent states may authorize the their corporate dependencies (basically, bond-issuing municipalities and state corporate entities like utilities or pension funds) to seek bankruptcy protection in Federal Court (the state *itself *does not declare bankruptcy). In yet another SCOTUS decision this year, PR v Frankin California it was ruled that indeed not only was PR not able to authorize its dependencies to take that step, but neither could it create a homegrown debt relief system: the US Bankruptcy Code simultaneously preempts the existence of ANY local one, AND excludes any nonstate jurisdiction from using the Code’s relief, so the Congress that has to provide specifically for PR’s case if they wish to help.
That’s partly responded to in the Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act passed by Congress in June, that includes a stay in any creditor action against PR to give us time to pass a viable debt management/restructuring plan under the guidance of a federally appointed fiscal board and the Federal Court. (BTW, opposition propagandists cried “bailout” when actually it’s the Commonwealth itself that will have to come up with the cost of running the fiscal board). Notice that fits beautifully with the earlier decision on non-sovereignty, since it means that the local legislature’s powers to deal with their fiscal state can be reined in at will by the Congress.
This has been taken very VERY begrudgingly by the pro-statehood faction and has been welcomed as something of a lifeline by the anti-statehooders because of course, it will be much harder politically to sell the statehood of a place that’s in reorganization, and for the later groups it gives them time to propose a reorganization or economic plan that is statehood-incompatible (i.e. more corporate tax havening, lowering minimum wages, repudiating some debts, etc.) But at the same time, let’s be clear that nobody’s kicking any broke jurisdiction OUT of the Union. So a credible reorganization could overcome the short term difficulty in the middle or long term.
The DC electoral vote amendment would not in that case be moot. It would, effectively, state that the First Family gets three electors all to themselves. That makes a big difference.
Again: They are not legal registered voters of the District of Columbia. The Obamas are legal registered voters of Illinois, the Bushes of Texas.
JR Delerious, you referred to the English language version of the PR constitution becoming the official state constitution. Two questions if I may:
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Is the PR constitution currently bilingual?
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If so, why couldn’t the state constitution continue to be bilingual ?
When I referred to how the English version would stay unchanged as is, I was meaning it would remain *textually unchanged, *because “Commonwealth” is a perfectly cromulent styling for a US State.
The Spanish version, OTOH, which is the base document (i.e. rule of construction is if the versions seem to conflict, interpret the Spanish) would need revising because of the use of the phrase “Estado Libre Asociado” (Associated Free State) to refer to the Body Politic *and *to its territorial jurisdiction in like a dozen different places. You’d need to change it to plain Estado or Estado Federado or Estado Unido or at least just drop the “Asociado”.
I’ve always argued that we should go Canadian- or Irish-style and just refer to the place by name in the Constitution and laws but I’m outnumbered by an establishment enamored of formal legalese stylings.
Right, but even if we worked it out so that “the District constituting the seat of Government of the United States” had a population of exactly zero, the Twenty-third Amendment provides that “the District constituting the seat of Government of the United States” gets “a number of electors…equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives in Congress to which the District would be entitled if it were a State”. Every state gets two Senators (Article I, Section 3, Clause 1 and the last provision of Article V), and “each State shall have at Least one Representative” (Article I, Section 2, Clause 3). The Twenty-third Amendment sets a cap on the number of electors from “the District constituting the seat of Government of the United States” (“but in no event more than the least populous State”), but nothing in the original articles of the Constitution or any of the amendments contemplates anything as absurd as a state with no population at all; therefore, every state gets two Senators and one Representative, and therefore “the District constituting the seat of Government of the United States” gets three electors, even if we declare the aforesaid district to be a 1-inch-square area on the exact top of the Washington Monument.
It’s a weird situation; granted, if Congress (by ordinary process of law) just admitted almost all of the current District of Columbia as a new state (and left a little “ceremonial core” to act as “the District constituting the seat of Government of the United States”) then you would think it wouldn’t be that hard for everyone to quickly pass a clean-up amendment repealing the Twenty-third before we had another Presidential election.
Just out of curiosity, why do you need a federal district at all?
Interesting.
So you could have a bilingual state constitution, with a rule of interpretation that in case of conflict between the two language versions, the Spanish version governs?
Well, nowadays, it’s in the Constitution, and would require a constitutional amendment to get rid of (and that’s a very difficult process), and is pretty deeply embedded in American ideas of “the right way to do things in a federal republic” simply by virtue of that’s how we’ve done it for over two hundred years.
At the time, it was seen as necessary to prevent one state from gaining too much influence over the federal government.
But… Not now?