I agree with your whole statement except that I think major constitutional changes, in this case to a region, should have a supermajority consensus for it. So I wholeheartedly support statehood for DC for that reason. And I neither support nor oppose statehood for PR because there isn’t that consensus: instead it seems more like Brexit where there is only a slim majority either way.
The District of Columbia has zero representation, so what do you feel the states have? Negative representation?
Agreed.
This is an example of what Wolfgang Pauli referred to as “not even wrong”.
I covered that in my post, but I can elaborate.
The existing problem is that rural Americans have more power than urban ones, due to smaller population states tending to be rural and getting more representation per capita. Bringing in a small state that is entirely urban would help balance that back out.
That is the main political divide in our country. That’s how the parties largely divide: rural Republicans vs. urban Democrats. The system is currently biased towards the rural Republicans. Nate Silver once quantified that bias as around 2-3%, meaning that’s how much of a handicap Democrats have to cover.
People who complain about DC statehood being “unfair” nearly always cite that they would (most likely) bring in two voting Democratic senators and one voting Democratic congressperson. The idea is that this gives more power to Democrats–i.e. the party favored by urban America. But, if the system is already biased towards Republicans, the party favored by rural America, that argument becomes less tenable.
Other than an argument about representational voting power, I don’t see any other reason you can argue that making DC a state would be unfair. It’s not even like bringing in DC would overcome the gap completely.
I just moved a bunch of posts here, from the question about the name of a potential DC state. Sorry for any confusion caused by the relocation.
I don’t see that as being an improvement; you are just giving more electoral votes to a disproportionately small number of voters. The large population states are being further screwed. The fact DC is urban while Wyoming is rural doesn’t alter that.
Basing a democratic system on how the political parties of the day are CURRENTLY aligned is, obviously, fraught with problems, the most obvious of which being that there’s no guarantee that alignment will be true four or five elections from now.
Yes, but those people are fools.
If they’re not elected by the residents of DC, then they don’t represent them in any functionally useful way. They’re not accountable to the residents of DC at the ballot box. DC residents should have voting representation who are accountable to them electorally in the House and Senate, just like anyone else who lives in the US.
The congress is supposed to represent the best interests of every US city, state, territory, district, possession, and even individual citizen according to the democratic consensus of their own locality. At least this has some chance of happening in the states where citizens get to elect their representatives. In actual practice this is a adversarial system in which no one in congress will represent the real interests of the Federal District, and in fact see statehood for DC as a threat to their own political power.
An alternative proposal to statehood has been to remove the electors granted to the district and eliminate federal income taxes for it’s residents. Then we can watch how fast members of congress and others in the government who maintain residency elsewhere decide to become District of Columbians. And then they’ll have to explain why they aren’t voting for other politicians they’ve endorsed or even themselves and their past positions on short term and voting eligibility.
Members of Congress do have to be legal residents of the state they represent (though not necessarily of the same district, in the case of the House) to be elected. However, legal residency for the purpose of voting/election and residency for the purpose of taxes may not be one and the same, depending on the law in each jurisdiction, and the legal residency term for each state varies.
As you mention, their fellow officials back in Montana or New Mexico may not be very eager to politically support a Senator who only reestablishes legal residence and voting registration the last allowed day before the primary filing deadline of year 6 of this term, and then bails out again the day before the first payday of January of year 1 of the next.
But as stated earlier, the bigger challenge to that alternative comes as to whether if that happens, does the municipal government of DC then reserve autonomy to freely tax income earned inside the District (as do the Unincorporated Territories). I get the very strong feeling that ol’ Louie and his R buddies would not want to relinquish a veto over what DC can collect in taxes for its own use, and how to use it.
Beating a dead horse here, I guess, but another aspect is that congresspeople live here in only the broadest sense. Some will live in the suburbs. Joe Biden would commute in from Delaware. Others will bunk in there offices and only leave the capitol to go to and from the airport. They leave their families behind and go home every weekend and during the frequent recesses. They live in a different world than normal DC residents do.
Yeah, but it’s hard to waive away this one, because it’s huge. I look at it the other way. If DC was a bastion of right wing conservatism, Republicans would be for this and Democrats would be against it. If DC would swing both ways, it would most likely receive bipartisan support.
With the county as split as it is, anything that changes the landscape is going to be difficult.
I don’t feel this is true. I feel that while the Republican party has succumbed completely to self-interest, the Democrats are still capable of voting on principle. I won’t claim they always do it but they are capable of it.
If DC swung right and it was the Republicans trying to make DC a state, it would immediately happen with no Republicans saying, “Hey, maybe we should talk about this before we pull the trigger…”
I don’t doubt that Republicans would support it. But then the Democrats would be against it so who knows. But I doubt it would happen then either.
Admission has always, all the way to the start of the Union, been a political question in which the established state delegations and national parties have pondered how does this affect the delegation balance along whichever are the factions at play, and/or dilute their own share of the power.
The Democrats have had majorities, even solid majorities, in Congress several times in the last few decades while DC has been asking for statehood and Eleanor Holmes Norton has been filing DC statehood bills in every Congress she has been seated in. They only actually passed a bill in the House for the first time last year. And it was no less unfair in 1993 or in 2009 than it is in 2021. Except those two times the Dems held the Senate comfortably on straight votes so they did not need DC. So I dunno 'bout principle.
Democrats are capable of voting on principle. That doesn’t mean they always - or even usually - do.
The inderlying rationale for a capitol district back in 17xx was to insulate the weak federal government from the larger stateca and city it would be embedded in.
It hardly bears mention that the tables have turned on who’s big & who’s small.
And yet disingenuous arguments about the necessity of a separate district persist.
Several differences. If I move to Gainesville, Florida to go to college and register to vote in Florida, then I am declaring that I am a resident there with the intention to remain indefinitely. Florida doesn’t have a strong interest, and probably can’t prove anyways, that I truly DO NOT have that intention to the extent that I might want to live in Gainesville or somewhere else in Florida long term.
Given the idea that the new federal rump district will be an area with ZERO permanent residences, it is an impossibility that a hypothetical Jill Biden intends to remain there indefinitely. She cannot. She will be moving in eight years at most. It is a temporary job.
I’m not so sure.
The general level of residency that triggers an obligation to pay state taxes is 6 months. Of course it varies from state to state, but that’s the most common value. Someone intending to stay 6 months with no specific known ending date still is staying “indefinitely”. That doesn’t mean forever, or rest of your life. it means you have no specific plans to leave on a date more-or-less certain. And if you do have plans to leave in 7 months, that still doesn’t let you not start paying local state taxes after 6.
Given that arguendo 6 months is “long enough to be indefinite, but just barely”, a congressional term is 4x, that, a single presidential term is 8x that, a single Senate term is 12x that, and 2 presidential terms is 16x that.