D.C. Voting Rights

So I saw a guy on the Metro this week wearing a baseball hat that said "D.C. Statehood" and "Green Party." He was reading a book entitled "Animal Behavior and Game Theory." (Needless to say, he had a beard. Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

But seriously, living in the District means that you don't have the same voting rights as other Americans. No congressional representation, only a non-voting delegate (big whoop). No State government. Despite home rule, we are still under Congress's thumb. A thumb that has a decidedly anti-District print. So it's very different from living in a State.

I want to expand on this subject (the difference between D.C. residents and residents of the 50 States) in a later post. Right now, I just want to kick off that discussion by saying that while this discrimination against District residents is built-into the Constitution, there's a good argument to be made that this was not something that the Framers "intended," in the sense that they thought about it and then decided to treat District residents as second-class Americans. Remember, there simply was no District of Columbia at the time of the drafting and ratification of the Constitution. (Founded in 1790.) Let alone a District that has a larger population than at least one State (Wyoming, according to Wikipedia) and an economy much larger than several States.

What I'm driving at is that there's no principled justification for this discrimination, not even the quasi-principled argument that this is what the Constitution mandates. But to actually address this discrimination, one would have to attack the Constitution's preference for States as political entities, which would be almost impossible, politically, to overcome. Btw, the phrase "the Constitution's preference for States as political entities" is a strange one, to my ears, too. My argument is that persons (in a constitutional framework, especially U.S. citizens), should receive a greater preference than States qua States. But this will have to continue at another time.

I have a constitutional hook to hang this on, people. To be continued.