DC statehood Megathread (pg 33 - Manchin questioning constitutionality)

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that implies this is gonna start over again, which I'd assume this specific issue wouldn't

52. Puerto Rico
53. Mariana Islands
54. Virgin Islands

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The constitutional amendment approach to giving DC representation in congress was already tried. Only 16 states ratified.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_Voting_Rights_Amendment

Even if some ERA case caused the Supreme Court to rule that amendment deadlines are unconstitutional (not happening), there are only about 10 more states that could plausibly ratify that one, definitely not 20+.

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Welp...looks like this is dead for at least another 2 years....

Manchin says he doesn’t support D.C. statehood bill

#ManchinCycle

Cope.

LOL, you of all people to say that.

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Watching all the red avatars getting mad that their power grab failed is the perfect indictment of U.S. politics.

A power grab is refusing to a sit a Supreme Court justice for 10 months.

A power grab is actively trying to have electoral college votes thrown out cause you’re mad you lost.

Giving representation to the most taxed 700k residents in the nation is not a power grab just because it happens to benefit the party which you oppose.

I never said it was only Democrats who engaged in power grabs. But this right here certainly is an example of them doing just that.

The "power grab" is Republicans not letting the Americans who live in DC have the same rights as any other American.

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What rights are those? Electing senators isn’t a right.

Yikes. I'll at least give you credit for saying the quiet part out loud, but your position is antithetical to American values in my eyes.

Be honest with yourself. Democrats couldn’t care less about giving people voting rights. If they did, they would’ve made DC a state in 2009, when they had full Control of Congress. So why are they doing it now? 3 words.

Power, power, power.

They should have made it a state in 2009, but the movement wasn't as strong then. For example, DC's 86% vote in favor of statehood didn't happen until 2016.

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The difference was, getting rid of Jim Crow wasn’t a power grab, and also, Jim Crow wasn’t anywhere near as much established as the fact that the Capital should not be able to use its power to prioritize itself.

How would allowing the Americans living there to have 0.2% of House members and 1.96% of Senators suddenly be "prioritizing itself" ??

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https://twitter.com/SenatorCarper/status/1392835075352453121

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https://twitter.com/SenatorCarper/status/1392835075352453121

Not happening until Manchin agrees.

I think we're all aware of that. But the fact that this is still being discussed publicly, that Shaheen is adding her name to it just now, shows that it's not as dead as the doomers think.

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https://twitter.com/charlie_savage/status/1392800796258017289

One of Manchin's chief concerns was the 23rd amendment makes DC statehood unconstitutional, and Biden is pushing for the statehood bill to be written in a way to address that. Biden is not going to let this go.

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https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1393006919334473730

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Really the best scenario is to have them vote for the popular vote winner. Ideally the 23rd Amendment would be repealed before 2024 if statehood happens, rendering the issue moot.

The key question is whether Republican states will refuse to ratify the 28th amendment repealing the 23rd just to spite Democrats. I think a lot of them probably will, but giving the 3 EVs to the popular vote winner may incentivize them to do it.

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A thought I just had ... would there be any constitutional issues for Congress to direct the US Virgin Islands, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands to hold presidential elections, and to  allocate those 3 extra electoral votes to the winners of each of those 3 territories?

It's still not full equality for them, but it allows those Americans to have some say in the presidential election process, better than nothing.

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https://twitter.com/Meagan_Flynn/status/1397284340086845446

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https://twitter.com/Meagan_Flynn/status/1397284340086845446

C'mon folks let's make it happen already!

They're gonna get it done. It would be so embarrassing to have all this attention and keep talking about it and have it fail in the end. If it really weren't going to happen, they would have scuttled this months ago.

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https://twitter.com/Meagan_Flynn/status/1397284340086845446

C'mon folks let's make it happen already!

They're gonna get it done. It would be so embarrassing to have all this attention and keep talking about it and have it fail in the end. If it really weren't going to happen, they would have scuttled this months ago.

Just because it’d be embarrassing doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

I think Biden and Schumer have demonstrated time and again that they have better political chops than that.

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I’m opposed to DC statehood (NOT representation, that’s different) on the grounds that if we start letting random cities and tracts of land join as a state there will be no end to the lunacy of just adding new states to eliminate political opposition.

We don't have any other "random cities" that aren't part of states.

Carving up existing states is a whole other Rubicon that has nothing to do with letting already existing entities have equality with the current states.

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I’m opposed to DC statehood (NOT representation, that’s different) on the grounds that if we start letting random cities and tracts of land join as a state there will be no end to the lunacy of just adding new states to eliminate political opposition.

DC should join either Maryland or Virginia. The people there deserve representation like any other US citizen but the capital city of the country is not a state in and of itself. There’s no remotely comparable example of a tiny municipality just deciding that it was a full fledged state, and breaking precedent sets up a massive can of worms for blatantly partisan reasons.

My personal preference is to add it to Virginia since it’ll do Dems more good there than as part of Maryland, but I don’t think it’ll matter much in 10-15 years anyway.

It’s not a random city or tract of land, it’s an organized federal territory. It’s not like DC is succeeding
Any you know, there are more people than Wyoming and DC has a larger GDP than 16 other states, the only measure by which it’s tiny is number of trees and lawns.

None of that addresses why we should break precedent and make a literal city-state, something we’ve never done before. There’s literally no reason to do that rather than add it to an existing state outside of partisan concerns.

Similarly, there’s no reason to disenfranchise it outside of partisan concerns.

DC is basically just a partisan brute force battle. One day Dems will have a large enough majority and they’ll just force it through, and in response the next time the GOP has a large majority they’ll split Idaho or something. It’ll be the dumbest partisan food fight yet that helps nobody and it’d be infinitely better for the people of the United States to just circumvent that and enfranchise DC in a way that doesn’t break from the central meaning of a state since the inception of this country - as a territory that is governed by a centrally located state government, meant to be able to function as a separate independent body but also as one part of a whole nation.

"We can never have a state disconnected from US territory and sooo much bigger than any other state! We've never done that before!"
"We can never have a state that's nothing but islands thousands of miles away, and not even majority white! We've never done that before!"
"We can never have a state that's smaller in area (though not smaller in population) than an existing state! We've never done that before!"