Washington, D.C. Admission Act
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, when in the course of human events a relationship stops working and one party experiences a long train of abuses and indignities at the hands of the other, you scrap the old relationship and you start anew.
It is nothing personal, but I wish our GOP colleagues in the House and Senate could recognize that this just isn't working out anymore for the people of Washington. The relationship you have taken for granted for so long with the local population is dysfunctional and, frankly, abusive.
Plainly put, the people of Washington want out.
It is not just the pepper spray and the tear gas and the rubber bullets; it is not just crashing their churches and desecrating their religion with your photo-ops; it is not just the use of their sons and daughters in the National Guard to put down protests by their sons and daughters in the streets; it is not just the threats to Federalize their local police or the decision to overturn their adoption laws, their marijuana laws, and their health funding choices; or your control of their judges and prosecutors; or the constant Presidential insults leveled against their chosen leaders; it is not that the GOP Members who claim to be the attentive partners of the District never listen to the people here, never go to their local meetings, don't know the mayor or the city council or the ANC members; it is not even the $750 million that they just cheated the people of Washington out of in the middle of this plague.
It is something deeper. It is not just something you did.
The people of Washington have found someone and something else. They have voted to break up this dysfunctional relationship with Congress to start a healthy and respectful relationship with America.
In America, States make their own local policy and budget decisions without constant tampering and interference by other people's representatives.
In America, every political community stands on equal footing through statehood. Each one sends two Senators to the U.S. Senate and voting representatives to the House, delegations that guarantee no one will push their people around.
When you are a State, you help decide things like whether your country goes to war, who will be your judges and supreme court justices, how will your Federal tax dollars get spent, and what should be the laws of the Nation.
The only question now is whether Congress is mature enough, is man enough, to deal with the fact that Washington no longer wants to be under our thumb. A mature and faithful Congress that wants the best for all of its people is not afraid of statehood. We celebrate it. We delight in it.
America started as 13 States, but we have exercised our powers under Article IV, Section 3, 37 separate times to admit 37 new States, all of them by simple legislative acts, none of them by constitutional amendment, and each one was controversial in its own way.
I heard the gentleman say that you have to be either a territory or formally part of another State to be admitted as a State. It is not true. I have a one-word answer to that: Texas. It was its own independent country. It was a republic, and people said that was unconstitutional and Congress said: No, we are going to favor the trajectory of democratic inclusion and political equality.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. RASKIN. So every State has faced objections. They said Utah was too Mormon, and New Mexico was too Catholic. Hawaii and Alaska, in 1959, of course, they weren't contiguous; they couldn't be admitted.
Yes, the District exists now under Article I, Section 8, Clause 17, but the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia proposes to shrink the Federal district the way it was shrunk in 1847 because the slave masters of Virginia wanted the land back in advance of congressional abolition of the slave traffic in the District.
If we can modify the boundaries of the Federal district to placate the slave masters in the 19th century, we can modify the boundaries of the Federal district in the 21st century to grant statehood and equal rights to the people of Washington, D.C.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I claim the time in opposition to the motion to recommit.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I urge all of my colleagues to reject this weak and unconstitutional motion to recommit.
The motion proposes to condition the admission of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth on either the imposition of the whimsical policy preferences of the minority or simply banal restatements that the State will follow Federal law, which, obviously, it must do already under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution. All of the States must.
But the paradigm example here, and the thing that really appears to be really on their mind, and I am glad we at least have boiled it down to this issue, is they want to make sure that the new State doesn't come in without an amendment written by the people of Washington, D.C., saying that they will not charge people a fee for carrying a concealed weapon.
Now, that is not in the U.S. Constitution, and it is not a matter of Federal law obligating the 50 States to do it, so you cannot selectively impose that on the new State of Washington, D.C. That is the equal footing doctrine, which the Supreme Court has emphasized repeatedly throughout our history, that every new State that we have granted admission to since the original 13, all 37 have entered on the exact same plane of political and constitutional equality as the original 13.
So, they want to impose their various policy preferences on different things, like concealed carry weapons and so on.
If you want to do that, then try to pass it for the entire country, and it would apply within the new State, as well. I don't think you can do it constitutionally, but that is a separate matter. Or, resign your seat from wherever you happen to be from. If you are from Georgia, resign your seat in Georgia, move to the new State, and then campaign as a Member of Congress from here or campaign for Governor or State legislator in the new State and get them to change their law because that is a matter of local policy.
I would think that the great champions of federalism and State rights would want to allow every State to make a decision for itself.
Mr. Speaker, a number of things have been said that need to be corrected.
For one thing, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Roy) said that we should legislate for the real Americans, and he is going to speak for the real Americans, not the people who live in Washington. I would hope he would reflect on that and issue an apology to the people of Washington, D.C.
But it seemed that the logic of the argument was that the only people who live here are Federal employees, and they are different from the rest of America.
Now, think about that for a second. In the first place, the overwhelming majority of Federal employees do not live in Washington, D.C. As far as I could tell, less than 8 percent of Federal employees live in Washington, D.C., which means 92 percent of them live in our States in the rest of America.
Should those people be disenfranchised? Should people who work for the post office lose their right to representation in Congress? Should members of the Armed Forces be disenfranchised? The Supreme Court already said no in Carrington v. Rash. Check it out.
So, the overwhelming majority of Federal employees don't live in D.C., and the overwhelming majority of people who live in Washington, D.C., and are the constituents of Representative Norton are not Federal employees. They do other things.
Yes, they are real Americans, too. They are bus drivers. They are schoolteachers. They are businesspeople and entrepreneurs. I mean, come on, get real, be serious, get out and meet the people in Washington.
The gentleman from Georgia said Washington, D.C., was set aside in the Constitution as a Federal district, and that was echoed by the former judge from Texas. But here, our friends just advertised their unfamiliarity both with the Constitution and with American history.
The Constitution does not fix the geographic site of the so-called seat of government, the district that is set aside for the seat of government. That is why after the Constitution was adopted, the capital was in New York for a while. It was in Philadelphia for a while. Before that, it was in Trenton, New Jersey. It was in Princeton. It was in Annapolis. We have a whole room in Annapolis set aside for where Congress met.
So the idea that you can look up the Constitution and see the boundaries or the map of Washington, D.C., is just absurd.
Now, does Congress have the authority to modify the boundaries of the Federal district as proposed by Ms. Norton? Of course it does. We voted to do that in 1846 at the behest of a couple hundred slaveholders in Virginia who were afraid that this Congress would follow the advice of Representative Lincoln from Illinois, who said abolish the slave traffic in Washington, D.C.
And they were afraid it was going to happen, so Alexandria, Arlington, and Fairfax county were given back to Virginia, and it was perfectly constitutional. And there is no legal authority to the contrary in any way.
If we can modify the boundaries of the Federal District to placate a couple hundred slave masters from the 19th century, we can modify the boundaries of the Federal District to grant statehood and political equality for the people of Washington, D.C.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source