DC Home Rule

I'm leaving the District. I've said from the beginning when I moved here that I was going to leave before I was forced to get residency. The reason? Well, the House is giving us a very good example of that right now. I'm not sticking around a city where anything can be overruled by a Congress that I don't even get to vote for. I'll tell you something, though. I've never been a bigger fan of DC statehood than when I lived here. This is one voter who's going to demand her new VA rep support it.

EDIT: Ah, my mistake. Thanks for reminding me to elaborate. In Washington DC, no one is allowed to vote for a member of Congress who can actually vote on legislation. What we get instead is a non-voting delegate. The current one is Eleanor Holmes-Norton. She does a good job generally, but she's hamstrung by the fact that, well, she can't vote. In addition, although Washington DC has its own city council and is allowed limited home rule, Congress actually has jurisdiction over what happens in the District, and because we're more reliant on federal funding than most cities and states (Given the fact that we're...well... the capitol), Congress can pretty effectively strip funding for whatever it wants without ever being held accountable by the voters that their decisions actually affect. Recently, the House decided to pass a bill banning abortion after 20 weeks only in the District, and then, to add injury to insult, refused to let Del. Holmes-Norton even testify at the hearing in order to give the perspective of the DC citizenry (which is very disproportionately Democratic and does not approve of the bill).

edited 29th May '12 8:44:20 PM by Clevomon

Could you add a bit in your OP where you explain what rights Washington DC residents should have, and how the system is set up? You know, for us foreigners.

Ideally, anyone should be able to jump right in to an OTC thread with having read just the OP.

At the very least I think the city deserves to have control over how things are run there. I mean, fuck, the Congressmen themselves don't live there permanently and as such don't deserve to be able to make local decisions that otherwise they're stating is a state's rights issue. Sadly, I'm from Texas which is heavily Republican. (That might be changing soon, though.)

I'm also for allowing your one delegate to vote, too. I don't think this "non voting" member stuff should fly anymore when we're calling the shots. This extends to Puerto Rico and the other territories.

So your capital doesn't decide what goes on in the most important part of its city boundaries?

Wha?

Why not just make it an autonomous region? Or a city-state? That shouldn't be too hard, right? Lots of countries have national capital territories that act as a city-state (eg. Berlin, London [technically a city-region]).

edited 29th May '12 9:51:46 PM by BestOf

From what I understand, the city of Washington has its own mayor, but Congress has the final say so.

I think.

What TC said. See, Congress never thought that the capitol was going to become as populous as it is. To that end, they actually gave back some of the land to whatever state loaned it for those purposes. So Congress at the time saw no problem with pretty much saying what went on, because in the start it was basically only busy when Congress was in session. Fast forward a couple hundred years and it's one of the most populous cities with a population that gets little say the affairs of their own home.

There's also the little fact that the Republicans would love to add it back to Virginia in order to make it part of a Republican consistituency so that the majority Democrat population gets hamstringed still. And of course the Democrats would like it to be its own thing in order to get an assured Democratic seat in the Senate and House. Someone is likely to always be trying to veto it because of that. It's going to take a whole lot of pushing to get DC's status changed. And it's going to have to be country wide, too. I'm afraid that just one city doesn't make it politically untenable not to care about this issue.

Can't the DC citizens petition for statehood? Then the issue is actually brought before Congress. And once it's a state, Congress can no longer touch it freely.

This is all rather bizzare.

Why does the presence of government in the region stop it from being just another state? This'd be like people in Edinburgh not being able to vote because Parliament is based there. I mean, it is just a building. I realise that it had significance back in the early days but that was a long time ago.

edited 30th May '12 12:02:24 AM by TheBatPencil

I don't think the issue has ever been brought up seriously. There has to be a desire within the region itself. *shrug* Seems like they're starting to get that motivation, though.

But yeah, they can petition. They certainly meet the requirements. But that also requires that the people get motivated to do so, and they're not a standard American territory like Puerto Rico where they can put that to a vote periodically. They're kind of a weird case. But again, it would require the people in the area to be sufficiently motivated to petition for it, and then to gain outside and then Congressional support. The actual process is a lot more complicated than it sounds when you just say it.

I'm agree with the weirdness of the situation, probably even more so since Australia has a situation that is directly analogous.

Added an extra arrow for being ninja'd

Specifically the ACT which is an autonomous territory created specifically to house the national capital. The federal parliament does have the authority to override its legislature. However it does send two fully participating members to the federal House of Representatives and two senators (as opposed to the twelve the states send) to the federal Senate, though it does share them with the Jervis Bay territory.

There are occasional controversies when the Federal Parliament overrides some local legislation (same-sex marriage in the ACT and legalisation of euthanasia in the Northern Territory) but not about not having their say at the federal level.

edited 30th May '12 12:59:48 AM by KnightofLsama

Oh, there's been a desire within the city for a while and all sorts of efforts to try to get statehood, or at least more autonomy than we currently have. Heck, the main DC license plate is a protest one that reads "Taxation Without Representation." It just keeps getting blocked in Congress. Or else Congress keeps trying to monkey around with it. One time there was a bill in place, a representative managed to attach a measure that would repeal all of DC's gun laws (some of the strictest in the country due to the high crime rate). Frankly, the Congress just sees the District as a handy way to score political points, never mind the people who actually live there.

The whole thing with DC is rather complicated. Everyone agrees that they should have representation in the United States government, but no one can agree to how that representation would be handled. The Republicans want to return DC to Maryland, so that DC's Democratic slant would be downplayed by being a part of Maryland. The Democrats want DC to be its own state so that it can have two Senators same as any other state. Maryland apparently doesn't want it back and the DC residents would rather have statehood. In addition, there is the complication of DC's existence being defined by the U.S. Constitution which means any possible proposal not involving an Amendment could be considered unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. It's an unfortunate mess that needs to be straightened out so that the people in DC can have representation.

Ahhh. So, to grant DC statehood - or even grant it more powers than it ordinarily has (i.e. turn it into an autonomous region) - would require an amendment to the Constitution?

...

-_-

Did the founding fathers just want to make everything difficult or something? Then again, "there is no ordinary question in American politics, that can be turned into a judicial question (i.e. sent to the SCOTUS) in American politics."

No, to grant it more powers would only require that Congress agree to pass something. Unfortunately, then you start running into the partisan brinksmanship that's stalled out everything else in Congress recently.

EDIT: To elaborate, making it a state would definitely require an amendment to the Constitution. However, generally granting it more home rule and possibly even giving them a proper representative would only take an act of Congress unless it got appealed to the SCOTUS. However, it's never even been able to reach that point before, so we don't know if it can be done without a constitutional amendment. The problem is that this affects none of the members' constituents directly by definition, so they feel absolutely no pressure to work on it seriously.

edited 30th May '12 4:51:35 AM by Clevomon

Ah. So, its more of "Congress is in gridlock over this issue" more than "the Constitution is in gridlock over this issue"?

Just make it part of Virginia already, jeez.

I don't think the State of Virginia would like to annex DC with its crime problems.

I am rather torn between whether I want DC to be a State or a part of Virgina (I certainly don't want them as part of Maryland).

If they were their own State, they'd be basically useless as far as the House and Electoral College go, but they'd be useful because they'd be two free safe Democratic Senate seats, which is quite the reward given the size of DC.

On the other hand, if they were a part of Virginia, we'd turn Virginia into a blue State and thus get it's Electoral College seats for the Democrats, as well as at least one Democratic House Representative. It would also make it much easier for the Democrats to contest and hold Virginia's two Senate seats.

In that light, I think I'd prefer to make it a part of Virginia.

That was part of my reasoning.

The other part of my reasoning is that if there was ever a state who needed another major urban center, it's Virginia.

Just send it to Virginia already. Jeez. Stupid Congress.

Another objection to DC statehood is that Washington is largely a company town, whose business is government. A sizable chunk of its residents—if not a majority—have a vested interest in bureaucracy and governmental meddling for their own sakes. For this reason, as well as others, limited-government types across the spectrum think it would be more appropriate if D.C. was absorbed into a neighboring state, and its peculiar priorities diluted into a pool of citizens with fewer ulterior motives.

The entire District originally belonged to Maryland, so it seems reasonable that Maryland be the state to get it back. Additionally, Maryland's political tendencies are far closer to D.C.'s than are Virginia's; the only reason to choose the latter would be political maneuvering—a kind of reverse gerrymandering.

I suppose Maryland would be fine, too. It doesn't make much difference to me. As long as they're being represented.

If we wanted to troll the rest of the country, join 'em to a state they're not even geographically connected to. Like Michigan or Alabama or Hawaii.

I object to making it part of either state because that doesn't seem to be what the residents want. Not to mention it's a great way to create another situation to ignore them in.