D.C. Statehood Is Unwise and Unconstitutional
Last week’s outrage at the Capitol has fomented calls for District of Columbia statehood. Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) explained that the riot “made it crystal clear why D.C. officials must have full control over their city’s own security and police force to secure the public safety of its residents.”
So, then, statehood will strengthen riot prevention.
But when Congress abortively voted for D.C. statehood last June, after Black Lives Matter protests, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) said, “Trump’s recent decision to deploy thousands of federal law enforcement officers in D.C. against residents peacefully exercising their constitutionally protected right to protest, and without the consent of the district’s elected officials, demonstrated the urgent need for full local government and congressional representation.”
So, er, statehood would temper riot prevention. Take your pick.
Entrusting the national government’s security to a state has, of course, already proved unreliable. After hundreds of soldiers mutinied in June 1783, briefly blocking federal delegates’ exit from the Pennsylvania State House, the state refused to deploy militia, forcing Congress to flee Philadelphia. This encouraged lawmakers to eventually create an independent district in which to seat the federal government.
As James Madison soundly argued in Federalist No. 43, America mustn’t put the nation’s capital at the mercy of a state government to steward the former’s ongoing needs. That’s why doing so was made unconstitutional.
Yes, this inconveniences the statehood push. Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution grants Congress plenary power over the nation’s capital. Federal lawmakers may, and have, ceded some powers to local D.C. government, but they cannot relinquish their authority over the city permanently, as they would by bestowing statehood upon it.
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Not unless they amended the Constitution, which, of course, they know they have no chance of doing anytime soon. Statehood supporters have thus chosen a legally tough path: until the Obama administration, every Justice Department that examined the statehood issue concluded Congress can’t make the city into a state through a simple statute.
Even though the currently proposed law would leave a Capitol “district” with a small area and a few buildings under federal oversight, Article 1, Section 8 precludes turning any part of D.C. into a new state. So does the 23rd Amendment, which provides the municipality containing the federal government with three electoral votes for president. Statehood proponents cannot justify granting three electoral votes to a new, densely populated city-state and letting a low-population (or no-population) Capitol district keep its three electoral votes. Yet that’s what the proposal under discussion would do.
The bill purports to address this problem by expediting the process by which the 23rd Amendment could be repealed. Still, the task legislators would face seems hardly expeditious: they would still need to pass repeal with two-thirds majorities and get assent from 38 state legislatures. Perhaps Democrats could unite behind this repeal effort, but Republicans would have every reason to resist, forcing the issue before the (probably like-minded) Supreme Court.
Despite all the pitfalls ahead of them, statehood backers are tenacious. They lament that Washington, D.C., residents lack a representative with full voting rights in Congress. However, if they cared about that, they’d face better odds trying to return D.C., minus the areas around the Capitol, to Maryland. But statehood advocates care mainly about enhancing Democrats’ political strength.
Imagine it: two more unflippable Senate seats and a solid-blue House seat with full voting rights. Not bad for a territory of 68 square miles—none of them rural—with only around 700,000 people. True, Vermont and Wyoming have even smaller populations, but neither rival D.C. in terms of median income. Once it becomes a state, America’s capital would turn into a much greater political powerhouse than it is even now.
When statehood was proposed in 1964, Attorney General Robert Kennedy called the city’s existence outside any state “indispensably necessary to the independence and the very existence” of the federal government. So it was, and is. But why let that get in the way of today’s Democrats’ appetite for omnipotence?
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