A Different Kind of Capital

Jesse Jackson wanted to be a U.S. senator from D.C. Not just a “shadow senator,” but a real one. For that reason—though not solely that reason—he’d often say,  “Statehood for the District of Columbia is the most important civil rights issue in America today.” Proponents have been saying as much ever since, including just last week.

My response has always been that, if true, this is fantastic news—because it would mean we have no serious civil rights issue in this country.

Bear in mind, I don’t think this is actually true. But if it were, that would be tantamount to saying, “problem solved.” Because D.C. statehood, while a legitimate issue to debate, isn’t a particularly important issue on the terms stated by its advocates.

Partisanship in fancy clothes.

If I said that the most important economic problem in America is, “The carried interest deduction is too low,” I could be fairly interpreted as saying, “We really don’t have any major economic problems in America.”

Of course, one could also reasonably infer that I would personally benefit from a lower tax rate, because it’s such a strange thing to say. Once Jesse Jackson realized he wasn’t going to be a real senator, he pretty much moved on from the statehood issue. If it really was the gravest civil rights problem in America, he probably wouldn’t have done that.

Which brings me to my first point: I know there are people who care deeply about D.C. statehood on the merits. But if D.C. were a majority Republican city, there would be a lot fewer people pushing for it—on the left. You can be sure, however, that it would be a staple of every Republican platform.

Now, this doesn’t mean that people pushing for statehood are wrong. One of the actual benefits of partisanship in our Madisonian system is that it drives partisans to make the best arguments they can find for stuff that is in their interest. If self-interest rendered all political arguments null and void, very few people would argue about politics outside of philosophy seminars.

For instance, one of my core peeves about the D.C. statehood campaign is that proponents will often cry, “No taxation without representation!” It’s a perfectly valid argument for them to make. But as a D.C. resident, if I had my druthers between paying federal taxes or having two senators and a representative, I’d pick no taxation in a heartbeat. In the pantheon of easy choices, “Eleanor Holmes Norton gets a vote on the House floor, or you don’t pay income taxes,” is right up there with, “You can live in the sewers fighting Morlocks over rat meat, or you can win the Powerball.”

If D.C. were a federal tax haven, it would become Monaco-on-the-Potomac in a matter of days. And while I would very much like to have my property values increase a thousandfold overnight, that doesn’t mean I’m necessarily wrong to favor no taxation over representation. (Indeed, if you wanted to take my half-baked idea seriously, you could even give poor residents a kind of voucher for their rental properties that would have to be bought out as legions of billionaires moved into the city to set up their legal residences.)  

Consider this fairly typical framing of the argument by Ty Hobson-Powell at The Progressive:

As a D.C. resident, I do not see this as being about politics. It’s about fulfilling the promise of our Constitution and enfranchising the more than 700,000 mostly Black and brown people, who have waited centuries for representation in Congress. 

D.C.’s lack of representation continues to be rooted in white supremacy and driven by false concerns over “corruption” or the alleged inability of our city to manage its own affairs. These are all dog-whistle arguments meant to undermine leadership of color. 

Let’s unpack some of this. And let’s also save that bit about “fulfilling the promise of our Constitution” for last. More than 700,000 people live in D.C., and they haven’t been waiting for “centuries” for representation in Congress. You know how I know this? Well, firstly, because life expectancy in D.C. is only about 78. In other words, claiming this is an intergenerational struggle is ahistorical hogwash. The debate over D.C. voting rights is pretty old, but the idea of statehood is fairly recent. D.C. has been mostly managing its own affairs for a while, and its political leadership has been mostly black for decades.

The use of the phrase “mostly Black and brown” is a bit of a stolen base as well. D.C. hasn’t been majority black for a while. The share of people saying they are solely black/African American is 46 percent. The share of people saying they are white is also 46 percent. The rest are Hispanics, Asians, etc. (Though some of the whites are also apparently Hispanic.)

If the “brown” in “mostly brown” is supposed to refer to Hispanics, or Asian Americans, or African or Caribbean immigrants, it’s a stretch to say that these relatively recent arrivals have been fighting for statehood and against “white supremacy” for centuries.

Here’s the most important data point: Only about 37 percent of D.C. residents were born here. This means that nearly two-thirds of D.C. residents moved here from somewhere else, quite a few of them from other countries.

In other words, the majority of people who live here chose to move here, knowing full well that D.C. isn’t a state and doesn’t have full representation in Congress. (Residents can vote in presidential elections, however, thanks to the 23rd Amendment.) If I move near the airport and suddenly start protesting about the noise and traffic, that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. But my outrage would seem a bit misplaced. 

Which brings us to the Constitution’s “promise”—and that bit about “white supremacy.” From 1800 to 1950, the white share of the population never dipped below 64.6 percent. In other words, “Chocolate City” began in 1960 and started to peter out in the early 2000s. Given how people can find white supremacy in almost anything these days, it shouldn’t surprise me that people can find it in these trends, but I just don’t see it. I mean, this would imply that, for most of D.C.’s existence, the people being denied their “civil rights” were white. Those are some dumb white supremacists. 

America’s exceptional Capital.

E.J. Dionne writes:

The United States is alone among the democracies in flatly denying basic political rights to the people who live in its capital city. Paris, London, Rome, Berlin, Madrid, Lisbon — I could go on — all play a vibrant role in the national politics of their respective nations, and are represented in full. Washington is treated like a colony, a distant territory, a political inconvenience.

This is a good rhetorical point. It just leaves out a key detail. Paris, London, and Rome weren’t clawed out of the wilderness to create the seat of government, never mind the seat of government in a democracy. They were prosperous cities that colonized the rest of the territories that eventually became their sovereignty—and then a few other countries. They became capital cities through raw military and economic power.

The Founders wanted a completely different kind of capital. If you’ve seen the musical Hamilton, you might recall that Jefferson thought it was so important to get the capital out of New York City and the dominion of its political class that he acceded to Hamilton’s scheme for the federal government to assume state debts in exchange for creating a capital on neutral—and more southern—ground. That was the whole “Room Where it Happens” number. Federalist 43, written by James Madison, explains why the Founders thought it vital that a state not be the home to the capital. It would give too much power to local leaders to muck and meddle with national policymaking. He called it an “indispensable necessity” for the federal government to control the capital city.

Now, I don’t think there’s a real danger of D.C. statehood leading to a Game of Thrones scenario where the City Watch of King’s Landing gets to put a sadistic moppet in the Oval Office. But the Founders, lacking HBO, were fairly up to speed on the countless examples from English and Roman history of how proximity to power creates advantages that undermine the proper functioning of government.

Nor do I think it’s necessary to play “What If?” games about a January 6-type situation in which D.C.’s leadership is in cahoots with a Trump-like figure trying to steal an election. But one need only think about how former Gov. Chris Christie’s administration in New Jersey played games with the George Washington Bridge, or the well-established tendency of senators and congressmen to bend to small favors and conveniences, to see how statehood could be a problem.

As Madison wrote:

The indispensable necessity of complete authority at the seat of government, carries its own evidence with it. It is a power exercised by every legislature of the Union, I might say of the world, by virtue of its general supremacy. Without it, not only the public authority might be insulted and its proceedings interrupted with impunity; but a dependence of the members of the general government on the State comprehending the seat of the government, for protection in the exercise of their duty, might bring on the national councils an imputation of awe or influence, equally dishonorable to the government and dissatisfactory to the other members of the Confederacy. This consideration has the more weight, as the gradual accumulation of public improvements at the stationary residence of the government would be both too great a public pledge to be left in the hands of a single State, and would create so many obstacles to a removal of the government, as still further to abridge its necessary independence. 

You can dismiss these concerns, and you may be right to, given the nature of modern government. But spare me talk of the “Constitution’s promise” when doing so.

Dionne continues:

Some Republicans have proposed “retrocession” as a solution, merging most of D.C. with Maryland, from which much of its territory originally came when the city was created in 1790. This would conveniently block overwhelmingly Democratic Washington from adding two senators to the Democratic caucus.

This is clever framing. Making D.C. a state—which is very hard to do constitutionally—is now cast as obviously right and natural, and opposition is presented as a cynical way of avoiding the “inconvenience” of two more Democratic senators.

Again, I don’t dispute for a moment that most Republicans oppose statehood for precisely the reasons Dionne suspects. My point is that most Democrats favor it for precisely the same reason. And while Dionne does a good job of homing in on dumb GOP talking points, that doesn’t mean the GOP, self-interested as it may be, has the worse argument.

If the issue was civil rights and all that, retrocession would indeed be the way to solve what proponents insist is the actual problem. But when faced with this nakedly obvious truth, they fall back on gauzy, quasi-nationalistic arguments about the pressing need for D.C.’s independence as its own organic community. This is a particularly odd argument for people who normally have contempt for state sovereignty and federalism. It’s odder still for a remarkably transient city with few of the attributes we associate with states.

The land that makes up D.C. all came from Maryland for the purpose of creating a capital. Its residents insist that they must have statehood to deliver voting rights. But when you propose something constitutionally achievable to do that—retrocession—they suddenly talk about the unique nature of D.C. and why it should be ratified with statehood. I just don’t see it. New York City didn’t cease to be New York City when it lost the capital. D.C. would not cease to be D.C. were the capital to become part of Maryland. (Of course, this wouldn’t solve any of Madison’s concerns.)

If you think the most pressing civil rights issue in America is the lack of voting rights for congressional representation in the capital city, fine. But if you reject that, maybe it’s because the civil rights issue isn’t the most pressing issue after all.  

Not everyone in this debate is a partisan. But take out the partisan priorities, and nobody would be debating it.