People periodically complain — with some justification, I think — that it’s unfair that D.C. isn’t represented in Congress. Its residents deserve representation, so D.C. should become a state.
But as a California resident, I’m struck by the unfairness of the remedy the pro-statehood forces propose. D.C. has about 1/60 the population of California — and about 1/10 the population of the average state — but statehood proponents want it to have the same number of Senators as we Californians do. So instead of underrepresentation in the Senate, they want 10-fold overrepresentation in the Senate.
Ah, some may say, but the two-senators-per-state rule is an unfairness that’s built into the Constitution. Indeed it is. But so is the no-senators-for-D.C. rule; both are constitutional rules. And just because there is some unfairness in the Constitution already (for instance, that Wyoming has two senators just as California does) doesn’t mean that we should exacerbate it further.
It seems to me that the fairest solution is to give D.C. one representative — its population is not far from the population of a Congressional district — and have it share Maryland’s two senators. As it happens, Maryland has roughly average population for a state, so that would be pretty fair; D.C. residents, as well as Maryland residents, would have a roughly average voice in the Senate and in the House.
Now naturally there may be political objections to this proposal, which would require a constitutional amendment: Maryland residents may not want D.C. residents diluting Marylanders’ votes for Senate. But my argument is that Californians, New Yorkers, Texans, Floridians, and other big-state residents should make sure that there are similar political objections to any D.C. statehood proposal, since they too shouldn’t want D.C. residents further diluting the big-state voters’ votes for Senate.
Finally, of course I realize that the main political calculation behind D.C. statehood debates has to do with party power: Two Senators from D.C. would be Democrats, and likely very liberal Democrats. Republicans who oppose D.C. statehood, no matter how principled their official objections, may well be motivated, deliberately or subconsciously, by this partisan concern. But of course one can say the same about Democrats who support D.C. statehood. My point is simply that even if one sets aside the partisan considerations — purely for the purposes of argument, I suspect, since I doubt that the partisan considerations could in fact be set aside — and tries to argue in terms of democratic principle, the statehood solution is substituting one unfair situation for another.
All this assumes that the original reasons for denying representation to D.C. and for having two senators per state are no longer sound today. I tentatively think that they indeed are no longer sound; there is something still to be said for them, but on balance their minor remaining value is outweighed by the value of political equality of voters. But for purposes of this post I’ll basically assert this rather than trying to demonstrate it, recognizing that this makes this post potentially persuasively only to those who share my assumptions that the denial of representation and the two-senators-per-state rule are both somewhat unfair today.
UPDATE: There are several ways in which my vote-with-the-Marylanders scheme might be accomplished. It’s possible that Congress could retrocede all or most of the District to Maryland, just as it retroceded the Virginia part of the District (which originally included a chunk of Virginia) in the 1840s to Virginia. This wouldn’t require a constitutional amendment by itself, I think, though I’m not sure whether it would require Maryland’s permission; but it would probably require an amendment to repeal the 23rd Amendment, which gave D.C. special voting status in presidential elections. The scheme could also be implemented by a constitutional amendment that preserves D.C. as a separate enclave, subject to federal control, but lets it vote with Maryland; this might, under article V, require not just the usual supermajority for amendment purposes but also Maryland’s pmerission. But I mention all this now only because some correspondents have raised the issue; I originally omitted it because my question is about what’s the fairest thing to do, not how precisely it ought to be done. I’d still prefer to stick with that original question, and set aside the details for now.
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