WHICH ARGUMENTS MIGHT GENERALIZE?

Can the residential parts of the District of Columbia become a state?  David Harsanyi suggests it's a bad idea.

[T]he Founders ... created a federal district for the distinct purpose of denying it statehood. First, because they were concerned about the seat of federal power being controlled by a hostile or intrusive state government. Second, because they knew that if the capital were in a state — much less its own state — the people would vote to grow and accumulate federal power. Both situations were incompatible with the proper separation of powers and state rights.

To some extent, as he concedes later, the people who live in an adjacent state, and work for the federal government, vote to expand and accumulate federal power.

People like to argue that the Founders never anticipated that millions of Americans would be living and working in the District. Indeed, the more powerful the permanent political class in D.C. becomes, the more reason we have to deny it statehood. Washington would likely be nothing but a swampy backwater village if it hadn’t been created for, again, the purpose of not being a state.

The permanent political class is buying that prime real estate in Maryland and Virginia (and there are some important operating facilities of that federal government located in Maryland and Virginia).

And it doesn’t matter if there are 20 or 20 million people residing in its ten-square-mile boundary. We already have Maryland and, increasingly, Virginia doing D.C.’s bidding. Washingtonians already have far too much power over ordinary Americans. And the town’s great wealth is produced by taxing citizens and creating federal laws that centralize power. Why would we want to give the federal government more power?

His fear is that creating another state adjacent to the seat of federal power creates a state with a congressional delegation interested in ... expanding federal power. That seems to be a common objection. The challenge, though, is in treating fairly those people who might live in the capital district whose income might derive from federal activities but whose skills have commercial value elsewhere: restaurant staff, clerical staff, custodians, elevator maintainers.  The statehood argument includes an element of horizontal equity: should a person who takes a job in the capital lose the voting rights he held in the same job anywhere else?  Our Political Masters addressed some of that with a constitutional amendment giving capital residents a vote in presidential elections.  Members of Congress vote in their home states.  I don't know whether that's true of departmental secretaries or other high-level functionaries.  Doesn't the creation of a new state require the repeal of that existing constitutional amendment, particularly if the capital district becomes an area with no residents?

Then the partisanship commences.  Rick Manning suggests that statehood, rather than the existing procedure called retrocession of residential areas, is a way for the party of government to pocket a few more seats in Congress or a few electoral votes.  "Cede the residential areas of D.C. back to Maryland and repeal the 23rd amendment to empower these Americans. Unfortunately, just as the Democrats motive for D.C. statehood are two additional Senators, the loss of two Electoral College votes stands as those same Democrats roadblock to a Constitutional pathway to the vote for the people of D.C."

Even more interesting, though, is an argument two contributors to Huffington Post raise.  Republicans object, for partisan reasons, to adding two senators and at least one representative to the federal legislature, when those delegates are likely to be from the party of more government, for fear of unbalancing the legislative chambers.  Marylanders, apparently, object to retrocession because that would ... unbalance the legislative chambers.

Beyond respecting the wishes of District residents, the vast majority of Maryland’s politicians do not want D.C. to join the state as it would transform the state’s politics, which are dominated by the suburbs that surround D.C. and Baltimore. The admission of D.C. would introduce a second major city to the state and tilt the state’s politics away from the suburbs and toward D.C. and Baltimore, the latter of which is often in conflict with state politicians from both parties who direct resources toward rural, suburban and exurban areas.

That article acknowledges the people who do the routine work of the city, which is to say, the people whose case for equal representation, somehow, is at stake.  Jesse Jackson spells out what that stake is.  "Making D.C. a state finally would end the denial of voting representation to more than 700,000 Americans, a majority of whom are Black or Brown."  He continues, "[The district] has more citizens than Vermont and Wyoming, and about as many as Alaska. Those states, of course, are overwhelmingly white."

Patrick Buchanan takes the bait.  (Ah, the joys of our long-lived political class!)  "Statehood for little D.C. could start a trend where mega-cities like Chicago and New York, with five and 10 times the size and population of D.C., secede from their respective states and seek full statehood as well."  Well, why not, there are stirrings in some of the large states to devolve the cities.  Mr Buchanan notes that Texas is capable of dividing itself into multiple states, and I can imagine a sort of partisan throwdown in which a workable plan to turn the residential parts of the capital district into a state becomes a Texas partition, and some of the other states rid themselves of their troublesome big cities.  That people might have world-views for reasons other than High Ideology might make such an outcome more likely, or perhaps less likely, the existing state boundaries sometimes include mixes of people born into different world-views, and how much longer can residents of the northern part of Mexico put up with an incompetent central government in Mexico City?