ONE WASHINGTON STATE IS ENOUGH
The columnist George Will has uncovered a secret Democratic plot to undermine the Constitution and “pack” the U.S. Senate with two new senators from a new state which the Demos are nursing along to birth in the sure knowledge that it will be forever Democratic and its senators will be a permanent addition to the their present majority in the Senate, guaranteeing their control of the government far into the future.
This coup d ¢ etat will be effected, according to Mr. Will, by passage of a D.C. House Voting Rights Act giving Washington D.C. a regular House of Representatives seat with voting rights, offsetting it with a new seat for the state of Utah. The thinking behind this seems to be that the Republicans expect Utah to stay Republican, so they’ll let D.C. have a Democratic seat in order to shut it up. It’s still not an even deal since Utah would get a new seat anyway through next year’s census. The Constitution is being ignored because new states, the only creatures entitled to seats at all, have to be admitted formally by Congress, but the supporters of the seat bargain think they can get around this.
The Democrats don’t really care about one more seat in the House, but they care a lot about using it as an entering wedge for the takeover of the Senate. If they can get away with Deal No. 1 -- and Will thinks they can with Utah’s connivance -- by making D.C. in effect a “state” without Congress voting for it, the way will be open for the big score, two more Democratic Senators forever and ever amen.
I omit some details of the scheme, but Will shows that it’s entirely feasible and President Obama will sign on to it as soon as it hits his desk. After all, lack of so-called representation for D.C. is on his list of discriminatory offenses against the rights of black people in the U.S. The city is 70% black and Hispanic in population and obviously is being victimized for this.
This easy explanation does not account for the fact that the city has not always been minority-dominated but in fact for most of its history had a white majority population whose members also were not entitled to vote. This deprivation was deliberately enacted by the Constitutional Convention in 1787. The objective was to keep the government which was to be domiciled in D.C. as immune as possible from the pressure of local mobs rising up to threaten it. If they couldn’t be prevented from assembling and getting disorderly and intimidatory, they could at least be kept voteless, which would go a long way toward pulling their teeth. Not much else could be done to control them.
The Convention had before it the horrible example of what had happened in London in 1780. Under the instigation of an eccentric young nobleman, Lord George Gordon, a huge mob gathered to protest the relaxation of the English penal laws against Catholics. Rioting soon started, to become known as the Gordon “No Popery” riots. The Houses of Parliament were heavily attacked, but refused to give in to the rioters. The drunken chaos continued for a week with attacks on M.P’s., citizens, pubs, jails, foreign legations and unfriendly houses. At last the King himself had to use his troops to put down the mob.
This wasn’t the first or the only time local mobs in a capital city had overborne a national government and tried to impose their will on it without regard to the sentiment of the bulk of the country concerned. It was minority rule with a vengeance. London was notorious, but Paris was equally so. In Rome the reigning pope was regularly evicted from the city by the mob when it went on a tear.
The Parisians really got into their stride two years after the Constitutional Convention when they stormed the Bastille, hanging its governor and starting the French Revolution, of which Paris continued to be the center until things began to quiet down in 1794 and the guillotine was given a little rest. This helped to convince our country’s leadership that they had made the right decision in passing up America’s only sizeable cities, Boston, New York and Philadelphia and making a yet unbuilt city, Washington, the national capital, far removed from the danger of overthrow by any group of citizens even if they succeeded in reaching it in the first place. Oh yes, it was designed by a French engineer who provided it with long broad boulevards suitable for firing cannon down to break up an advancing mob.
The high priest of the anti-city philosophy was Thomas Jefferson, who never stopped denouncing cities for their promotion of vice and greed as opposed to the virtues of farmers living the good life in their own fields and orchards. In an agricultural country such as America was, he had no shortage of followers who shared his views, but he also had to face the fact that the country was not meant for peasants only and needed roads and highways and in fact a lot more territory, which he obtained through the Louisiana Purchase. Jefferson knew how to rise above principle when it was necessary.
The national suspicion of cities has never gone away, though, and they still aren’t as much admired as they feel they should be, because for all the fun and the money and distraction they provide, they still have the drawback of attracting undesirables of all types who see the possibilities of getting a living without work either by crime or panhandling or welfare fraud or whatever. Centuries ago things were the same. The underclass, as we call it today, existed and nothing could be done about it. Americans, though, took one precaution. They were starting a country from scratch and they wanted to be sure neither the nation or its states should be ruled from a Paris or London infested with all the worst elements of the country. So they created Washington. They also created Albany, Harrisburg, Tallahassee, Sacramento, Austin, and other communities not known to fame.
In case you don’t recognize them, these are the state capitals of some of the largest states in the Union, all of which contain cities that are much larger and to many, more suitable for a state capital than the comparative hamlets shown. But it was done deliberately by the state founders for the reasons I’ve been citing in this article. They wanted to nullify the power of local majorities to control central governments. If they could have disenfranchised the inhabitants they would have done so. In Washington it was done. As I’ve shown, color prejudice had nothing to do with it. No reason then remains to violate the Constitution to rectify an injustice where one has never existed. OK, Mr. O?