With President Donald Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., last week, calls for the district to become a state have ratcheted up.
“The president’s abuses are evidence of the urgent need for D.C. statehood so that more than 700,000 D.C. residents can finally have the full rights and privileges afforded to other Americans, including control of their own local resources and policies,” Washington’s (thankfully) non-voting delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton, said.
Not only isn’t it problematic that Washington residents are denied the privileges afforded other Americans, but it’s literally the point. Feel free to move. But this is the one plot of land in the entire nation that the Founders explicitly denied statehood. The reasons are sound. They were concerned about the seat of federal power being controlled by a state government.
Yet, Democrats, because so many of them live and gravitate to the place, want to localize one of the only things in the Constitution that’s explicitly federalized, while federalizing everything else.
One of the more popular suggestions I hear these days on how we could fix the problem of Washington residents being denied a vote is to shrink the district and hand over certain residential areas to Maryland and Virginia.
Again, the first thing to note here is that it’s not a problem that they can’t vote. The second thing to note is that the borders of the district aren’t too big; if anything, they’re too small.
The Founders knew that if the nation’s capital were in a state, much less its own state, the residents would be incentivized to vote to accumulate more power and treasure for themselves. Because of the perpetual growth of Washington, a massive workforce, not merely government workers but those who feed off the behemoth, has invaded surrounding states and ruined them, as well. If we’re going to amend the Constitution, we should be expanding the borders of DC to include places like Montgomery and Alexandria counties so that fewer of these people get representation in Congress.
Washington, without a deep-water port, would be little more than swampy backwater if it hadn’t been created for, again, the explicit purpose of not being a state. The city only has its wealth and booming economy due to its designation as the capital. The glorification and massive expansion of that city didn’t really happen until the 1930s.
Consequently, Democrats like to argue that the Founders never anticipated hundreds of thousands of Americans would be living and working and making generational homes in the district. They’re right. They didn’t want a permanent political class entrenched in a state lording over the rest of the nation.
Inevitably, someone will tell me that the Founders couldn’t have foreseen the creation of most states, either, because the world has changed. They unquestionably foresaw the exponential growth of the nation. That’s why they laid out a process for statehood. It wasn’t even theoretical. Vermont was added to the union three years after the ratification of the Constitution. There were 17 states by the time James Madison, the author of Federalist No. 43, arguing for a federal district, won the presidency. It would be far more honest for Democrats to argue that Madison got it wrong.
Holmes Norton also knows well that Washington has been in control of its own local resources and policies since the District of Columbia Home Rule Act of 1973 was passed. It’s done an awful job of governing itself since then. But whether you agree with his deployment of troops or not, Trump isn’t abusing his power by taking control of the city’s police but reasserting it.
TRUMP HAS NO BUSINESS BUYING A STAKE IN INTEL
Of course, we all understand that the reason Democrats want to turn Washington into a city-state is to guarantee them two extra seats in the Senate. And that is also surely the reason many Republicans so vehemently oppose it. And the partisan nature of that debate speaks strongly to the need to have a federal district.
Which again, is the very reason the place exists in the first place.