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Statehood for Washington, D.C.? No thanks

The blogger at Staunch Moderate posts Taxation Without Representation, in which he writes about how it's unfair that the District of Columbia doesn't have any representation in Congress.

I usually agree with what Staunch Moderate writes in his blog, but in this case I can't resist offering an alternative opinion. As all Americans should know (although I had a lawyer friend who wasn't aware of the fact), Washington, D.C. is a district that's not part of any state, and therefore D.C. doesn't get to send two Senators and at least one Representative to Congress like all the other states get to do.

But it's hardly fair to say that the citizens of D.C. have no influence over our federal government. In fact, I'd say it's just the opposite. The people who run our federal government live in D.C. And I'm not just talking about the people who move there temporarily when the administrations change, but also the regular government bureaucrats who aren't associated with any particular political party. I would say that the citizens of D.C. have more influence over our federal government than the citizens of any state in the nation!

The people who complain about D.C. not having representation usually support D.C. being granted statehood (although Staunch Moderate remains silent on this matter). I can think of at least two reasons why that wouldn't be appropriate. The first is that D.C. isn't really big enough to be a state. From a population perspective, it has about the same population as the least populated state in the nation, Wyoming. But Wyoming, at least, is a large land mass. D.C. is a tiny little area that was carved out of Maryland.

The second reason, which isn't necessarily a fair reason, is that I think of the kind of Senators that D.C. would elect. Do I want two Marion Barrys in the U.S. Senate? No!!! For those unfamiliar with him, Marion Barry is the former mayor of D.C. who was sentenced to six months in prison for smoking crack cocaine. The current mayor, Anthony Williams, has his own share of scandals. Even people who hate Republicans have to sympathize with them just a little bit on this issue.

If a solution to D.C.'s lack of representation is really required (and I don't think it is), then I'd suggest that D.C. be given back to Maryland. But it's not at all clear that the people of Maryland would want receive a city that has the highest murder rate of any big city in the United States according to SafeStreetsDC.com, making it the nation's murder capital in addition to the political capital. (As a side note, it's kind of funny how people make a big deal of the fact that 105 soldiers were killed in Iraq since the end of hostilities, but there were 202 homicides in DC so far this year, according to the DC police. There is something wrong when a war zone in the Middle East is less dangerous than living in our nation's capital.)

posted Thursday, October 23, 2003