Democrats are considering several bad ideas to change our nation’s rules on voting, including a younger voting age, a national popular vote, and that voting rights be restored to felons on parole or in prison (even in states where the legislatures have rejected the idea). On Thursday, the Democrat-control House Committee on Oversight and Reform is holding a hearing on granting statehood to Washington, D.C., complete with two voting senators.
This is a bad idea, but not just because Washington, D.C., so reliably votes for Democrats (90.48% for Hillary Clinton in 2016, compared to vote shares of 69% and 62% from the next most lopsided locales, Wyoming for Trump and Hawaii for Clinton) or because it enjoys so many benefits from its physical proximity to power and access to gorgeous monuments and “free” museums supported for by taxpayers across the country.
But the basic idea of Washington, D.C., being a state should remind us of a riddle Abraham Lincoln is said to have invoked during his presidency:
So it is with Washington, D.C. Calling it a state will not make it a state.
It is a solitary city, created by the government, whose reason for existing both in terms of jurisdiction and economy is beholden to governmental interests.
“State” isn’t just a synonym for “region,” even though it’s assumed something like that meaning in our particular country. The word has a long history of referring to something like “the government”; when our national government was constituted, it designated autonomous and independent political entities. There is a reason that the Declaration of Independence refers three separate times to the 13 colonies as “Independent States.”
Then, of course, came the fight to ratify the Constitution and establish a national government. The point here isn’t that 13 states predated Washington, D.C. — the district predated 37 subsequent states, after all. It’s that states were independent beings that may as well have been small countries.
States had cities (plural) and a capital city each; they contained a plurality of interior jurisdictions (counties and townships) at some geographic remove from each other. They could not be traversed in a single day on foot. (For all that Rhode Island’s tininess is bally-hooed, it’s still 1,033 square miles of land, while D.C. is 61.) And between production and trade, their economies were self-sufficient; in other words, they did not owe one-third of their GDP to the spending of tax dollars collected from other states.
What powers Washington’s economy isn’t a minor detail, it’s a basic disqualification. The entire function of the “Seat of Government” established in Article I, Section 8 of our Constitution is that it will attend to the government of the nation. It is a “public servant” writ large. Giving the people responsible with that government a hand on the steering wheel is a conflict of interest, since the choice to make Washington our federal capital is the only reason it gets to be rich and educated while the rest of the land along the Potomac in Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia is still rural and quiet.
But the truly unserious nature of this 51st state proposal becomes clear when you learn that the DC Statehood plan would keep a part of the District as a non-state. The map proposed by the district’s non-voting Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton would leave several core city blocks to the government but make a state from the rest of the land, completely surrounding it much like the city of Rome surrounds Vatican City.
If that was news to you, you might be wondering why the proposed remedy for the alleged problem of D.C.’s disenfranchisement is carving out a 51st state. A less controversial remedy would seem to be to restore that land and its residents to Maryland, from which D.C. was originally carved.
If that sounds crazy, realize that this already happened. Washington used to occupy the full 10 miles square (equal to 100 square miles) allowed by the Constitution, with the straight borders on Maryland’s side of the Potomac matched by borders on Virginia’s side. The land was returned by Congress to Virginia in 1846.
But perhaps the issues of voting rights and “taxation without representation” are actually of secondary concern. Perhaps the Democrats’ silence on several recent congressional proposals to return that land to Maryland betrays a lack of commitment to the supposedly sacred right to vote and a focus, rather, on using D.C. to give them two new virtually permanent seats in the Senate.
If it is right and necessary that citizens of D.C. have a voice in national elections, then let them come home to Maryland. We would be wrong to call D.C. a state, and we should call out any bizarre insistence that D.C. become a new state as the raw political ploy that it is.
Noah Diekemper has a bachelor’s degree from Hillsdale College and is pursuing a master’s degree from Loyola Univesity Maryland. He’s previously written for The Federalist, Intercollegiate Review, and the Baltimore Sun.
