DC statehood Megathread (pg 33 - Manchin questioning constitutionality)

[ibagli]

And as for the 23rd Amendment, it explicitly leaves the power of appointing the District's presidential electors to Congress "as Congress may direct," so if the DC statehood bill as currently proposed were to be enacted & the federal district were to become merely the White House, the Capitol, the Supreme Court, & the handful of other federal office buildings adjacent to the National Mall, Congress could literally just direct that those 3 EVs not be cast at all, thus removing any potential constitutional issues emanating from there.

If the Carper bill is the same as HR51 from the last Congress (the text isn't published yet), that's actually already included:

SEC. 223. Repeal of law providing for participation of seat of government in election of President and Vice-President.

(a) In general.—Chapter 1 of title 3, United States Code, is amended—

(1) by striking section 21; and

(2) in the table of sections, by striking the item relating to section 21.

(b) Effective date.—The amendments made by subsection (a) shall take effect upon the date of the admission of the State into the Union, and shall apply to any election of the President and Vice-President taking place on or after such date.

Edit: It is the same.

[ibagli]

Also when can you expect to hear from the Parliamentarian re: the filibuster?

I don't think the Parliamentarian does that kind of thing on non-reconciliation bills.

[ibagli]

If it get thru Filibuster, Murkowski proposes a law that will make Elenor Holmes Norton a Rep without the Senators with voting power, that would be a compromise

that feels very unconstitutional.

I agree 100%, it violates the plain text of Article I, but the idea has been floating around for a while. There was a bill that almost passed in the Bush(?) administration that a bunch of bipartisan legal experts endorsed. Back in the bad old days, this cockamamie thing was the best Democrats were able to hope for though.

[ibagli]

The court yeeting a whole state from the union would be a constitutional crisis unparalleled in living memory and thus an excellent test of the limits of judicial review, and I hope that if it comes down to it, the administration would make enough noise to scare the justices (or at least Roberts and Kavanaugh) away from the challenge.

[ibagli]

If DC becomes a state, will the US House size be increased to 436? And will it stay that way after the 2020 reapportionment?

Yes.

(1) PERMANENT INCREASE IN NUMBER OF MEMBERS.—Effective with respect to the Congress during which the State is admitted into the Union and each succeeding Congress, the House of Representatives shall be composed of 436 Members, including any Members representing the State.

[ibagli]

If DC becomes a state, will the US House size be increased to 436? And will it stay that way after the 2020 reapportionment?

Yes.

(1) PERMANENT INCREASE IN NUMBER OF MEMBERS.—Effective with respect to the Congress during which the State is admitted into the Union and each succeeding Congress, the House of Representatives shall be composed of 436 Members, including any Members representing the State.

Is this really in the bill?  I had no idea.  When AK and HI were added, they temporarily expanded to 437, but went back to 435 after the 1960 reapportionment.

This seems like a pretty bad idea.  If you are going to introduce a bill to expand the House, expand it in a meaningful way, but leave it at an odd number.  I suppose they just didn’t want to risk losing votes from the states that might lose the seat?

Either that or they were trying to keep the number of presidential electors the same? The current DC electors come from a notional 436th representative and 101st and 102nd senator. The pre-2019 versions of the bill clawed it back to 435 but I've never seen an explanation for why it was changed.

[ibagli]

Imo the right way to deal with Manchin's opposition and make everyone happy would be to reunify West Virginia and Virginia

Wouldn’t that make New Virginia a red state?

It would be a swing state (Obama-Romney-Trump-Biden) that would eventually slide away from Republicans due to the suburbs and poor growth in Appalachia, assuming current trends continued. Which is basically what happened in real Virginia, just later. I think it would still have been to the right of the country in 2020, though, so that would quite possibly make both the electoral college and Senate harder for Democrats in the short/medium term.

[ibagli]

What the US are exceptional in is in disenfranchising said federal district. The only country that does something even remotely similar to my knowledge is Australia, which gives Canberra only 2 Senators instead of the usual 12 and with Canberra only having partial home rule.

That used to be far more common, it's just that the USA has so many veto points that when democratic norms shifted, the Constitution couldn't. In 1978, there was such a strong bipartisan consensus that DC deserved representation that the DC Voting Rights Amendment got the necessary supermajorities in both houses of Congress. That just wasn't enough, and the amendment fizzled, and eventually so did the consensus about DC needing representation (and, generally, the consensus around pro-democratic structural reforms, such as abolishing the electoral college).