September 24, 2007
Protecting Homosexuals at Columbia from Discrimination II Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:00 AM EST John Steele Gordon calls my latest post “utter nonsense.” “If discriminating against homosexuals is bad, hanging them is far, far worse,” he writes. Obviously, I agree. Mr. Gordon continues: “If gay students at Columbia need be “shielded” from having to face the presence on their campus of an organization that requires homosexuals to keep quiet about their sexual orientation, they surely should not have to face the presence on their campus of someone who hangs people for being gay, even if that person will not be hanging any homosexuals on Morningside Heights.” In my view, there is a difference between actively discriminating against someone and advocating for the subjugation of similar people. I’ve already attempted, twice, to outline this distinction, as I see it. Mr. Gordon evidently finds this distinction unconvincing, and that’s fair enough. He views this pair of moral problems and resolves them differently, and I find his reasoning interesting. It’s disappointing to me that Mr. Gordon would call mine “nonsense.” Given what a civil and respectful conversation this has been, such labeling seems rather cheap. But hey, I’ve been a Mets fan for 21 years and I can live with disappointment. I’ll add one correction. Mr. Gordon suggests that I do “not seem to understand what ROTC is.” I am actually quite familiar with what ROTC is, if not with the specifics of Columbia’s relationship with the organization. Harvard also bans ROTC, and ROTC-enrolled students here take their classes at MIT. I have good friends in the organization. I regret my careless wording, which may have inadvertently conflated the issues of allowing ROTC on campus and allowing military recruitment in general. The issues are, of course, related. For what it’s worth, I also know plenty of people who actively oppose bringing the military back to Harvard’s campus, for reasons totally unrelated to “anti-military posturing.” Their opposition has to do with the fact that the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy is an institution of tremendous intolerance. I do not doubt their sincerity.
September 23, 2007
Protecting Homosexuals at Columbia from Discrimination Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:20 PM EST Alexander Burns quotes me as follows: “ROTC is banned from Columbia because that institution disagrees with the official policy of the United States government, a policy that discriminates against homosexuals in the military by requiring them to keep silent as to their orientation. But Columbia welcomes the president of Iran, although the official policy of the government of Iran that he heads—not just his personal opinion—is to execute homosexuals by hanging them.” He then writes that, “This is a nicely symmetrical but oversimplified description of Columbia’s moral dilemma.” He adds, “ROTC is singled out for special treatment because the process of military recruitment, as it would take place on campus, might violate the university’s nondiscrimination policies. If recruiters came to Columbia, they would be engaging in an activity that treats some students in a degrading and discriminatory way. Banning them from campus has a whiff of political protest to it, but at heart it is a pragmatic move designed to shield students from immediate and active discrimination. President Ahmadinejad’s visit is different. It is an absolute abomination that his government executes homosexuals. But he’s not going to be executing them at Columbia, and he’s not going to be recruiting for the Revolutionary Guard, either.” I’m sorry. I have the greatest, genuine respect for Alexander Burns, even—perhaps especially—when we disagree, but this is utter nonsense. If discriminating against homosexuals is bad, hanging them is far, far worse. If gay students at Columbia need be “shielded” from having to face the presence on their campus of an organization that requires homosexuals to keep quiet about their sexual orientation, they surely should not have to face the presence on their campus of someone who hangs people for being gay, even if that person will not be hanging any homosexuals on Morningside Heights. I might point out that Mr. Burns does not seem to understand what ROTC is. Columbia does not ban ROTC recruiters from the campus. It bans ROTC, which stands for Reserve Officers Training Corps. It is a program that students can join, should they so choose, before coming to Columbia. In return for considerable help in paying college tuition, students who join ROTC contract to spend a certain number of years in the military as military officers after graduation. Students going to Columbia can still participate in ROTC, but they must go to the campus of Fordham University in the Bronx in order to take the required classes and training. That is a considerable inconvenience at the least. The ban at Columbia, which dates to 1969 (the same year as the Stonewall riots, ironically), had nothing initially to do with discrimination against homosexuals. It was rather a protest against the Vietnam War. Discrimination against gays is simply the latest excuse for what is, at its heart, anti-military posturing. It has more than a whiff of political protest to it, it has a foul and pervasive odor of political protest to it.
September 23, 2007
The Jetsons Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:20 PM EST The homepage of this website reports that today is the anniversary of the first broadcast of The Jetsons (in 1962), a TV cartoon of the early ’60s. I can only dimly recall the show, although I remember that I didn’t much like it, which in retrospect surprises me, because it appeared just around the time I fell in love with science fiction. Maybe I disliked it because it wasn’t really sci-fi; as it happens, very little real sci fi is comedy, maybe because science fiction at least pretends to be interested in how things will be different, whereas comedy has a tendency to assume, even to insist, that things are always pretty much the same. That comic proposition—that nothing important really changes—is of course a more dubious proposition for the historically-minded. Then again, because science fiction prides itself on its serious interest in how things would be different doesn’t mean that the genre often gets the future right, or doesn’t unthinkingly project a present uglier than its authors recognize into a future that might in some respects be much better. Interestingly enough, the most impressive science fiction story on that very theme, William Gibson’s wonderful “The Gernsback Continuum” is to the best of my knowledge the only science fiction story American Heritage ever published, in its quarterly magazine Invention & Technology. The Jetsons was something else, in part an inversion and in part a repetition of The Flintstones (both shows were done by the same company, Hanna-Barbera). One of the core jokes both shows shared was indeed that nothing that matters about human nature really alters; the Flintstones were a paleolithic version of The Honeymooners, the Jetsons a sci-fi version of The Donna Reed Show. One thing that occurs to me now is that by the logic of Hanna-Barbera, in the old days typical Americans were blue-collar, whereas in the future they would be white-collar. That was an interesting speculation for 1962, true in part, I suppose. A friend reminds me that the Jetsons was in some ways prophetic, in others decidedly not: You could read a newspaper off a screen, but you listened to music on a phonograph or a tape recorder, so the Jetsons foresaw the Internet but not the CD. Wikipedia adds that the Jetsons used folding money, not credit cards, and vacuum tubes rather than integrated circuits. I cannot recall whether the show either quietly mocked or unthinkingly recapitulated the logic of comedy when it suggested that nothing much really changes. I write this while taking a break from reading a short and impressive novella, Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution, which features an 89-year-old Sherlock Holmes surviving into 1944. I was told the punchline in advance, which has not yet spoiled the story for me. The very black joke of the punning title of The Final Solution seems to be that the future may hold truly dreadful and quite unimaginable surprises. It is as far from the anti-historical sensibility of The Jetsons as you can possibly get.
September 23, 2007
President Summers and President Ahmadinejad V Posted by Alexander Burns at 01:50 PM EST I’m grateful to Fred Smoler for his discussion of the 2002 controversy concerning Tom Paulin’s invitation to speak at Harvard. I agree with him that the Crimson’s position, in favor of withdrawing Paulin’s invitation, was wrong. To kind of backhandedly defend the Crimson, their editorial page has to find reasons to express moral outrage five days a week, and the Paulin controversy gave them a more interesting pretext for righteous indignation than, say, Harvard’s changing the date by which one must declare a major. One imagines this opportunity was too good to pass up. Similar motives could, I think, be accurately ascribed to some of Paulin’s faculty backers as well. Lawrence Summers’s role in the whole affair seems a bit murky to me, but I hope the account Mr. Smoler heard is correct. That would certainly add a measure of irony to Summers’s recent flap with the University of California. Let me quickly address Mr. Gordon’s further thoughts on Columbia University. Mr. Gordon writes: “ROTC is banned from Columbia because that institution disagrees with the official policy of the United States government, a policy that discriminates against homosexuals in the military by requiring them to keep silent as to their orientation. But Columbia welcomes the president of Iran, although the official policy of the government of Iran that he heads—not just his personal opinion—is to execute homosexuals by hanging them.” This is a nicely symmetrical but oversimplified description of Columbia’s moral dilemma. The university does not ban ROTC recruiters solely as a means of protesting a policy it does not like. I can think of many government agencies that have policies to which the Columbia faculty and administration most likely object, but their recruiters are still allowed to visit the school. ROTC is singled out for special treatment because the process of military recruitment, as it would take place on campus, might violate the university’s nondiscrimination policies. If recruiters came to Columbia, they would be engaging in an activity that treats some students in a degrading and discriminatory way. Banning them from campus has a whiff of political protest to it, but at heart it is a pragmatic move designed to shield students from immediate and active discrimination. President Ahmadinejad’s visit is different. It is an absolute abomination that his government executes homosexuals. But he’s not going to be executing them at Columbia, and he’s not going to be recruiting for the Revolutionary Guard, either. His visit will be limited to a speech that cannot actually harm anyone, except insofar as it wastes 45 minutes of their lives. As I wrote earlier, I’m not saying that Columbia has resolved these two quandaries—whether to ban ROTC and whether to invite Ahmadinejad—correctly. If I had Lee Bollinger’s job, I don’t think I would have decided to welcome the Iranian president into the halls of my school. But both of these situations are complex and tough to resolve. By answering them differently, the university isn’t showing hypocrisy. It’s acknowledging the individual complexities of each situation and dealing with them independently. A final thought. Earlier today I was discussing this issue with a friend who had an interesting take on Bollinger’s invitation to Ahmadinejad. It’s not an example of moral hypocrisy, this friend said, but rather a case of applying certain moral principles very consistently, and perhaps too much so. Over the summer, Bollinger led an effort to reject a boycott, by some British academics, of Israeli scholars and their home institutions. Bollinger decried the measure, saying it “threatens every university committed to fostering scholarly and cultural exchanges that lead to enlightenment, empathy, and a much-needed international marketplace of ideas.” In other words: You can’t keep someone out of your school just because you don’t like where he’s from or what he believes. I don’t know whether it’s totally appropriate to apply this principle to President Ahmadinejad. But if this is the reasoning behind Bollinger’s decision, then I’d say it’s at least a little respectable.
September 22, 2007
President Summers and President Ahmadinejad IV Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:10 PM EST Alexander Burns writes, of President Ahmadinejad’s invitation to speak at Columbia University, “Everyone’s entitled to free speech, but that doesn’t mean everyone’s entitled to an auditorium, an audience, and a microphone at one of America’s greatest institutions of learning. Once an invitation is extended, however, it should be maintained unless there is an exceedingly compelling justification for its withdrawal.” In 2002, I heard this view ascribed to Lawrence Summers, when Harvard’s literature faculty extended an invitation to the British poet and Oxford lecturer Tom Paulin, who had recently remarked that Brooklyn-born Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza strip should be shot dead (it is not clear why Paulin wanted to spare Bronx-born settlers, but in any case, Brooklyn Jews did seem to peculiarly excite his animus). After the Harvard English department had first proffered and then withdrawn an invitation to deliver the Morris Gray Lecture, Lawrence is said to have counseled that they were wrong on both counts, at which point Paulin was reinvited. Other accounts allege that Summers in fact (or first) pushed for the withdrawal of the invitation, and that the English Department first submitted and then resisted, but if the version I heard is correct, Summers believed that the harm done by appearing to legitimize a call for murder was more than offset by the danger of making it look as if Harvard could be bullied into withdrawing an invitation to speak. The Harvard Crimson made the opposite case, arguing for canceling the invitation: “When the English department learned that he advocated killing civilians and considered the Israeli military a modern-day incarnation of the SS, the content of his poetry became immaterial. . . . To let Paulin give a distinguished lecture at this University after expressing such an offensive and violent message would inevitably legitimize his hateful rhetoric.” I think (although I am not quite sure) the Crimson was wrong about that, although less wrong than some of the Harvard faculty, who couldn’t see any problem at all and in a curious non sequitur asserted that Paulin’s critics had yet again failed to distinguish between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism (no kidding). I think Alexander Burns is wise to distinguish between the right of free speech and the seemliness of Columbia’s higher echelons extending what rather looks like an honor. It is indeed odd to extend what looks like an honor to a man who in his official capacity presides over the judicial murder of homosexuals and the more surreptitious murder of many others. As I read John Steele Gordon, Mr. Gordon in this particular respect agrees with Mr. Burns. As I read the Columbia Spectator online, I notice that at least one student leader is “disappointed” that President Bollinger has spoken more harshly about President Ahmadinejad than he has about an abrasive opponent of illegal immigration, who at the invitation of a student political group addressed a Columbia audience last year. That undergraduate is probably not the only American who this week finds President Bollinger a bit of a disappointment.
September 22, 2007
Henry Kissinger Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:50 PM EST The homepage of this website notes that this is the anniversary of Henry Kissinger’s 1973 confirmation as Secretary of State. As I write this, a poll of readers asked to rank Kissinger’s merits in that post has a plurality (30 percent) assessing him as a good Secretary of State, and slightly smaller number (28 percent) assessing him as a great one. My guess is that what I consider a wild overestimate probably reflects disenchantment with the Iraq war, since over the last few years Kissinger’s alleged “realism” has often been juxtaposed to the supposed idealism of the current generation of neoconservatives, who are in one hostile interpretation damned as utopians (this is of course only one interpretation of the neocons, who are in other equally hostile accounts understood as profoundly cynical machiavels, covert Israeli agents, witting or unwitting tools of the oil companies, etc.) According to this particular theory, Kissinger knew the limits of the possible, while his neocon successors did not, and they thus madly sought to democratize a stable Baathist Iraq. By this account order in Iraq necessarily rested on tyranny, and the imperatives of containing Iran required that such a tyranny be based on minority (Sunni Arab) support, rather than majority Shiite support. Whatever the merits of this analysis of Iraq, Kissinger was not, in his day, a particularly realistic statesman, if realism is taken to include even a remotely accurate assessment of the trajectory of international politics. He seems to have had small grasp of economics—by one account, he encouraged the shah of Iran to support the 1973 oil embargo, so as to increase Iranian revenues. Kissinger certainly thought the shah of Iran a sturdy and perdurable American surrogate, our reliable gendarme in the Gulf, which was a fantastic blunder. He was remarkably indifferent to demands for liberty in the old Soviet bloc, Latin America, Greece, indeed everywhere, which means that he did not understand the forces that would within his lifetime destroy the Soviet bloc. He shared this failing with many, but those with whom he shared it are not normally called statesmen of genius, and unlike most of them, his own decisions brought us the shame of supporting tyrants without any durable gain in security; there are places (Greece, for example) where we are still hated for what Kissinger so complacently condoned. He also had a nasty habit of deriding people who took human rights more seriously than his sort of “realist” tends to do. Kissinger’s “realism” was in various other respects strikingly unrealistic. He thought the early-1970s United States a declining power, and the Soviet Union a rising one, a thought widely shared but less than prescient. A few years ago American Heritage published an interview with Ralph Peters—I conducted it—under the title “The Shah Always Falls”. Kissinger is the man who thought shahs rarely fall. He conducted American foreign policy accordingly, and I think very badly. In 1980 I heard an improbably amusing economist, asked for his opinion of Reagan’s chosen economic advisers, pause very briefly before judiciously characterizing them as “naive, but ill-willed.” Almost all liberals and many conservatives used to know this about Kissinger, although they rarely put the thought so pithily. It is not the least dispiriting sign of our times that people willing to use any stick to beat the administration have decided to use this one: Kissinger as statesman and “realist.”
September 22, 2007
President Summers and President Ahmadinejad III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:05 PM EST Just let me note that I entirely agree that the hiring, firing, and now rehiring of Erwin Chemerinsky to be dean of the new law school at the University of California–Irvine was a profound embarrassment. It at least has had a happy ending. But Chancellor Michael V. Drake has admitted “bungling” the whole business and taken the blame entirely upon himself. He did not act at the behest of an intolerant bunch of faculty members. So I think the Chemerinsky incident was a one-off. People being disinvited (not to mention fired) because of protests from the left-most members of university faculties are quite common, partly because college administrators (noting the fate of Lawrence Summers at Harvard, perhaps) are unable or unwilling to confront them. But Mr. Burns writes, “Focusing on Columbia alone, though, Mr. Gordon suggests that it is hypocrisy for the university to allow Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on campus while banning military recruiters. William Kristol recently made the same point. This seems a grotesque distortion—in the literal sense of grotesque as the yoking together of heterogeneous ideas. There is a difference between the beliefs of an individual, expressed publicly, and the policies of an organization, maintained by law.” Indeed there is, but that is not the case here. ROTC is banned from Columbia because that institution disagrees with the official policy of the United States government, a policy that discriminates against homosexuals in the military by requiring them to keep silent as to their orientation. But Columbia welcomes the president of Iran, although the official policy of the government of Iran that he heads—not just his personal opinion—is to execute homosexuals by publicly hanging them and many have been hanged. See here and here. (Warning: The pictures are very, very ugly.) If representatives of governments that discriminate against homosexuals are unwelcome on the campus of Columbia University, then why is President Ahmadinejad, the head of a government that hangs them, being welcomed there? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has the blood of homosexuals on the hand that Lee Bollinger will shake on Monday.
September 22, 2007
President Summers and President Ahmadinejad II Posted by Alexander Burns at 02:00 PM EST Following this comment in the discussion section of the site, I hesitate to respond to Mr. Gordon’s latest post, lest something tiresome should result. I’ll limit myself, therefore, to a few very brief comments. First, I agree with Mr. Gordon that the withdrawal of a speaking invitation to Lawrence Summers was an embarrassment for the University of California, for obvious reasons. Similarly, it was appalling to see the University of California, Irvine, offer and then rescind the deanship of Irvine’s new law program to the accomplished constitutional lawyer Erwin Chemerinsky, a famous liberal, for fear that he might be “polarizing.” There are certainly more liberals in academia than there are conservatives, but the politics of academic discourse is rather more complicated than Mr. Gordon’s barb—“No diversity of ideas at the University of California, please, we’re scholars”—suggests. I don’t really believe the Summers incident has anything to do with Columbia University’s extension of a speaking invitation to the President of Iran. It’s not really employing some kind of academic double standard for the University of California to do one thing while Columbia does another. Focusing on Columbia alone, though, Mr. Gordon suggests that it is hypocrisy for the university to allow Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on campus while banning military recruiters. William Kristol recently made the same point. This seems a grotesque distortion—in the literal sense of grotesque as the yoking together of heterogeneous ideas. There is a difference between the beliefs of an individual, expressed publicly, and the policies of an organization, maintained by law. Ahmadinejad’s politics are repugnant to me, but if I listened to him speak on the campus of an American university I would be doing so with all the protections of an American citizen. The good president could say what he likes and then I could go on my way, without any fear that his rhetoric of prejudice and hate might subject me to immediate harm. In contrast, homosexuals who wish to enlist in the armed forces are subjected to immediate and absolute discrimination, as mandated by the U.S. government. Whether or not you believe Lee Bollinger should let Ahmadinejad speak, or let ROTC recruit, it seems crude to call his decisions hypocritical. The two issues are entirely different. Perhaps surprisingly, I think I’m actually less warm than Mr. Gordon to the notion of letting President Ahmadinejad speak on Columbia’s campus. Everyone’s entitled to free speech, but that doesn’t mean everyone’s entitled to an auditorium, an audience, and a microphone at one of America’s greatest institutions of learning. Once an invitation is extended, however, it should be maintained unless there is an exceedingly compelling justification for its withdrawal. By my calculus, whiny complaints from The Weekly Standard or from P.C. faculty members don’t qualify.
September 22, 2007
President Summers and President Ahmadinejad Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:55 AM EST The University of California Regents recently invited Lawrence Summers, former president of Harvard, former Secretary of the Treasury, and distinguished economic scholar to speak to the Regents at a dinner in Sacramento. President Summers accepted. But then a petition signed by 130 or so feminist professors in the vast U.C. system protested having someone speak at an institution dedicated to the free expression of ideas who had once allowed himself to entertain the possibility of the existence of a feminist heresy and to allow that possibility to escape his lips. In a display of abject academic cowardice in the face of race- and gender-obsessed faculty such as is all too common these days, he was promptly disinvited. No diversity of ideas at the University of California, please, we’re scholars. Columbia University, meanwhile, has invited the president of Iran to speak on Monday, causing protests from a far larger number of people inside and outside the academy. President Bollinger of Columbia University has issued high-minded statements about the need to hear everyone speak at an institution dedicated to the free expression of ideas. Yeah, right. I might point out that President Bollinger recently refused to allow ROTC to return to the Columbia campus, because the American military, obeying an executive order issued by Bill Clinton, requires homosexuals in the military to hide their sexual orientation, a policy that is unacceptable to President Bollinger (and, incidentally, to me). Ahmadinejad, of course, doesn’t discriminate against homosexuals. He hangs them. Hypocrisy, if not diversity of ideas, is welcome in academia, apparently. More, the audience that will hear Ahmadinejad directly has been carefully chosen so good behavior can be assured. No such courtesy was extended to the head of the Minutemen last year when a group of liberal thugs ran him off the stage at Columbia University. The fate of the liberal thugs was to be told they had been very, very naughty and shouldn’t do it again. Personally, I think President Ahmadinejad should be as welcomed as President Summers should have been, and all those who try to prevent others from peacefully having their say should be told to drop dead in so many words. That, of course, would require having at least as much backbone as is possessed by a banana, and backbone, if not hypocrisy, is in short supply among university administrators when faced with their faculty. Of course, as speakers should be free to speak, so audiences should be free not to come hear them. I would be delighted if President Ahmadinejad faced nothing but empty seats on Monday. I am reminded of a classic New Yorker cartoon that ran after Houghton Mifflin published the English-language version of Mein Kampf. It was entitled, “Messrs. Houghton and Mifflin Tender a Tea for One of Their Authors.” It shows a hotel private dining room with an elaborate high tea laid out on a long table. In the room are two elderly gentlemen in frock coats and striped trousers and a Nazi-uniformed Adolf Hitler—holding a tea cup with pinky raised in the approved Emily Post manner. They are all elaborately ignoring the fact that there is no one else in the room. As the perpetrator of the Holocaust was treated in the cartoon, so should the advocate of another holocaust be treated at Columbia University. Alas, I’m sure the seats will be filled with people who think he should be heard but not Lawrence Summers. Lawrence Summers, if not the man who has called for Israel to be wiped off the map, raises possibilities simply too dreadful for academics to contemplate.
September 22, 2007
Washington, D.C. IX Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:40 AM EST Joshua Zeitz writes, “Wrong. I support granting full congressional representation to Washington, D.C., because its citizens pay federal taxes, serve in the armed forces, and shoulder the same responsibilities as the citizens of Wyoming, whose numbers are fewer. To date, three residents of the District have died in the Iraq War. Their parents deserve a voice and a vote in Congress. (We could just as easily reverse the equation: Mr. Gordon supports treating Wyoming’s population of 509,000 more equally than D.C.’s population of 581,000 because it provides two guaranteed very conservative seats in the Senate and one in the House in perpetuity.)” No. I support Wyoming having one representative and two senators because that is what the United States Constitution calls for, and I think we should follow what it mandates because, to quote Sir Thomas More (from memory and perhaps from A Man for All Seasons) “without the law, such a wind would blow as no man could stand.” For the same reason, I equally support Vermont having one representative and two senators, even though the state that once voted for Alf Landon over FDR is now jokingly referred to as “the people’s republic of Vermont.” Wyoming and Vermont are not at issue here. Their congressional representation is constitutionally set in stone. What to do about giving Washington, D.C., representation in Congress is a political question precisely because the Constitution is less than crystal clear as to what can be done and how. Reasonable people can—and do—disagree about what the best course of action might be. Mr. Zeitz writes that my suggestion to allow D.C. residents to vote in federal elections as though they were citizens of Maryland is “flawed.” Of course it is. If there were a perfect solution to this problem it would long since have been adopted. But mine is, I think, the best plan, as it would give D.C. residents the same voting power in Congress enjoyed by the residents of every other city in the country. All other plans I have heard of would give it grossly disproportionate representation by giving a city with a smaller population than Louisville, Kentucky, two senators of its very own. If it is “unfair” for Wyoming to have two senators, then surely it would be “unfair” to give Washington, D.C., two as well. Mr. Zeitz argues that D.C.’s political interests are different than those of, say, Annapolis and Baltimore, and therefore Maryland senators would not represent the residents of the District as they should. No doubt D.C.’s political interests diverge to some extent from those of Annapolis and Baltimore and even its own suburbs. But then those of Louisville differ from those of Frankfort and Paducah and its own suburbs, so the residents of D.C. would only be in the same boat as those of every other city, which is, of course, the boat they ought to be in. Mr. Zeitz, however, makes the very good point that in my plan the residents of D.C. would have no say over how the Congressional district lines would be drawn, as they could not vote for members of the Maryland legislature. Those lines would, undoubtedly, be drawn at their expense, as the disenfranchised will always get the short end of the political stick. This could be solved by giving D.C. as many congressmen as it would be entitled to as a state (currently one, and that’s unlikely to change) while having D.C. residents vote for Maryland senators and Maryland presidential electors. He also makes the good point that the amendment I proposed might arguably deprive Maryland of its “equal Suffrage in the Senate,” which is explicitly forbidden by Article V. But Article V allows a state to give its consent. Therefore let me revise my proposed Amendment.
AMENDMENT XXVIII
Section 1: The Twenty-third Article of Amendment is hereby repealed. Section 2: The District that is the seat of the government of the United States shall have as many representatives in Congress as it would be entitled to if it were a state. Section 3: Provided the state that ceded the land that comprises the District gives its consent by ratifying this amendment, residents of the said District shall be entitled to vote for the Senators and presidential electors of that state, the number of which shall be determined by adding the number of representatives of the district to the number of senators and representatives of the state.
Mr. Zeitz writes, “Mr. Gordon’s proposal ignores the fact that Washington, D.C., however narrow its economic base may be, is a discreet geographic and population entity that should enjoy full sovereignty over itself and full weight in Congress.”
That is not a fact; that is an opinion. To turn it into fact would unquestionably require a constitutional amendment, as Article I, Section 8 gives to Congress the power to “exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District . . .” And, frankly, I don’t see how it differs as a distinct geographic and population entity from every other city in the country, none of which have their own senators or full sovereignty. He writes, “Under Mr. Gordon’s plan (which is, by the way, a political non-starter: It will never, ever happen) . . .” I fail to see why it is so obviously a non-starter that Mr. Zeitz need not explain why it is. On the other hand, an amendment giving the District of Columbia two senators of its own is, indeed, obviously a non-starter. Such an outcome would require a vote of two-thirds of the House, two-thirds of the Senate, and the concurrence of 75 or 76 state legislative houses (if unicameral Nebraska were one of the ratifying states it would be 75). There is not a registered Republican in the country who would vote for an amendment giving the Democrats two permanent senate seats. Finally, he writes, “She [Marian Anderson] ultimately sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, courtesy of Harold Ickes and Eleanor Roosevelt, whom I suppose Mr. Gordon would consider “obsessed with race, class and gender.” Eleanor Roosevelt was deeply concerned with issues involving race, class, and gender, as well she should have been, because they were huge, largely unaddressed issues in her day and she was in the vanguard of getting the country to deal with them. She was successful in doing so, and we had an enormous—and enormously positive—social revolution in this country as a result. It was liberalism’s finest hour, and Mrs. Roosevelt is a national hero of the first order. But I have a news flash for Mr. Zeitz: Mrs. Roosevelt’s day was a long time ago. A person born the very day that Marian Anderson sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial would have been old enough to vote for John F. Kennedy; would have been fifty when the Berlin Wall fell; would have become eligible for Medicare three years ago. I had the enormous honor to meet Mrs. Roosevelt when I was a 16-year-old boy. She was very elderly—but still sharp as a tack—and she died the following year. I am now 63. The whole concept of class has for all intents and purposes vanished as a means of understanding the world in which we live. Blacks and women are the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, governors, secretaries of state, serious presidential contenders, wildly popular movie actors and singers, and world-class scientists. Mrs. Roosevelt would be very, very pleased with what she helped so mightily to achieve. But Rip Van Liberal, he just dozes on, listening to Marian Anderson (who died 14 years ago at the age of 96) on his Philco radio and seeing racism behind every bush.
September 21, 2007
Washington, D.C. VIII Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:50 AM EST A reply to John Steele Gordon, who writes: “I know why Mr. Zeitz would like D.C. to be treated as a state or even made one—it would provide two guaranteed very liberal seats in the Senate and one in the House in perpetuity.” Wrong. I support granting full congressional representation to Washington, D.C., because its citizens pay federal taxes, serve in the armed forces, and shoulder the same responsibilities as the citizens of Wyoming, whose numbers are fewer. To date, three residents of the District have died in the Iraq War. Their parents deserve a voice and a vote in Congress. (We could just as easily reverse the equation: Mr. Gordon supports treating Wyoming’s population of 509,000 more equally than D.C.’s population of 581,000 because it provides two guaranteed very conservative seats in the Senate and one in the House in perpetuity.) Mr. Gordon’s suggestion that we allow District residents to vote in Maryland House and Senate races is flawed. Most problematic are the abstract questions of sovereignty, representation and consent. Under Mr. Gordon’s plan (which is, by the way, a political non-starter: It will never, ever happen), the residents of Washington, D.C., would be lumped with Marylanders in federal elections, even though they do not share the same tax structure, local political institutions, school system, or interests vis-à-vis the federal government. Who would decide how D.C. residents were apportioned among new or existing U.S. House seats? The Maryland State Legislature, of course. Would D.C. residents have representation in the Maryland State House? Not under Mr. Gordon’s proposal. Would they enjoy input into the laws governing congressional elections? No, they would not. Mr. Gordon’s proposal ignores the fact that Washington, D.C., however narrow its economic base may be, is a discreet geographic and population entity that should enjoy full sovereignty over itself and full weight in Congress. Moreover, his proposal dilutes the representation of Maryland residents and thereby conflicts with their constitutional rights as well. As for the question of race, in his recurring screed against Democrats, whom he accuses of being obsessed with “race, gender, and class,” Mr. Gordon ironically demonstrates the opposite point: It is he who seems obsessed with “race, gender, and class.” Anyone who claims that D.C. statehood has faltered only on the issue of race is hopelessly oversimplifying the issue and has a one-track mind. Anyone, like Mr. Gordon, who claims that “race and racism [have not] played any part at all, at least in the modern era,” is also hopelessly oversimplifying the issue and has a one-track mind. (What on Earth does Jesse Jackson have to do with this issue? Who’s obsessed with race? How did gender enter this discussion? Until Mr. Gordon invoked it, I believe it was off the table.) Historically, Washington, D.C., was a Southern-leaning town with a great deal of race tension between its black residents and the federal government, and between its black residents and surrounding areas in Maryland and Virginia. D.C. retained slavery until halfway through the Civil War and was slow to desegregate its public accommodations in the twentieth century. Throughout the 1910s and 1920s the federal government’s buildings and facilities were segregated. When the famed opera singer Marian Anderson attempted to give a concert at Constitution Hall in 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution, who owned the building, refused her access. The hall manager even boasted that “no Negro will ever appear in this hall while I am manager.” (She ultimately sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, courtesy of Harold Ickes and Eleanor Roosevelt, whom I suppose Mr. Gordon would consider “obsessed with race, class and gender.”) In recent years, the city’s relationship with its suburban neighbors has been similarly strained. Rep. Stan Parris, who represented Fairfax County, Virginia, in the mid-1970s and again through the 1980s, famously called a bridge connecting Virginia and D.C. “the longest bridge in the world because it connects Virginia to Africa.” Some of his constituents thought this was a terrible thing to say, and others did not. In 1993, State Senator Warren Barry fondly recalled this quip at a Republican party tribute dinner to Parris and suggested that the bridge be renamed the “Soul Brothers Causeway.” All of this goes to demonstrate that Washington, D.C., has had an uneasy rapport with its suburban neighbors, and much of that tension owed to race. To deny that too many people continue to regard majority-black cities as less deserving or civilized than white suburbs is just as facile as denying that many people in this country have moved beyond that way of thinking.
September 20, 2007
Washington, D.C. VII Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:35 PM EST In response to the post of Joshua Zeitz let me make a few points. 1) Mr. Zeitz acknowledges a certain reluctance to engage me “on the question of whether D.C. statehood has faltered because of race politics, though I’ll admit to being extremely skeptical of his insistence that race and racism play no role in the matter.” I’m afraid I don’t know where I insisted on any such thing, although I cheerfully admit that I don’t see where race and racism has played any part at all, at least in the modern era. The obsession of the left with race, gender, and class explains, in my opinion, why it has been so politically ineffectual in recent decades. The country has long since moved on while the left continues to fight the battles it won 50 years ago, thus perpetuating the problem it claims to want to solve. If you want racism, however, try the left. It isn’t white racism against blacks, of course, but black racism against whites. Jesse Jackson, speaking at a historically black college in South Carolina, recently accused Barak Obama of “acting like he’s white.” If that isn’t racism, I can’t imagine what is. A significant segment of the Duke faculty formed the modern equivalent of a racist lynch mob last year when three white Duke students were falsely accused of raping a black woman. They looked at the skin colors of the accused and the accuser and made up their minds on that basis alone. They have still not apologized or even retracted their despicable words. 2) Mr. Zeitz writes, “The current population of Washington, D.C., is about 581,000. Last year, Wyoming’s population was about 509,000. Vermont’s, 603,000. North Dakota’s, 636,000. Alaska’s, 663,000. All four states have two U.S. senators. What’s good for Wyoming is surely good for Washington, D.C.” It would certainly be good for Washington, D.C. But would it be good for the country? I think not and, given the fate of the amendment to make D.C. the functional equivalent of a state, neither does a large majority of the country. Wyoming to be sure has a somewhat smaller population than the District of Columbia, and its small population is vastly overrepresented in the Senate and slightly overrepresented in the House (where the average district represents 689,000 people). But equal suffrage in the Senate was the great compromise that made the Constitution possible and it is the only part of the modern Constitution that cannot be amended. But Wyoming, while small in population, is large in area (it’s the tenth largest state at 97,000 square miles, 1,447 times the size of the District of Columbia) and diverse in both its geography and economic interests. Wyoming has farming, mining, tourism, logging, ranching, natural gas, and oil interests. Its manufacturing base includes oil refining, electronics, foodstuffs, clothing, and even aircraft. Its senators and representative, therefore, must balance the often conflicting interests of their constituents. Washington, D.C., has only two interests: the federal government and tourism. As I’ve said before, the District of Columbia is not a state, it is a company town, with only one industry and therefore only one political interest. If Kohler, Wisconsin, had two senators of its own, they would be obsessed with seeing that every house in America had an extra bathroom installed. The senators from Washington, D.C., would be obsessed with the care and feeding of the federal government. 3) Mr. Zeitz writes, “To be sure, the District’s bread and butter is the federal government. But was this not historically true of postwar Orange County, California, whose economic fortunes were so closely tied to federal defense spending and to federal irrigation and water projects, or vast swaths of the South, which relied on the federal government for subsidized electricity, dam projects, and agricultural subsidies?” Sure it’s true, but so what? Orange County does not have two seats in the Senate, and the South is much more than just a giant maw to take in federal subsidies. 4) I know why Mr. Zeitz would like D.C. to be treated as a state or even made one—it would provide two guaranteed very liberal seats in the Senate and one in the House in perpetuity. I would be interested in what objections, other than his personal political preferences, Mr. Zeitz has to my idea of counting the citizens of the District of Columbia—for purposes of voting for President and senators and representatives only—as being citizens of the state of Maryland. This would give them precisely the same representation in Congress and the same power to elect the President as every other American citizen has. Talk about fundamental fairness.
September 20, 2007
Washington, D.C. VI Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:50 AM EST Thanks to John Steele Gordon for his further thoughts on Washington, D.C. I believe Mr. Gordon is correct that amending the Constitution is probably the best method of granting congressional representation to the nation’s capital. I have a few further comments on his post, and also on Joshua Zeitz’s thoughts on this subject. To start, I’m not sure Mr. Gordon has understood my meaning perfectly well when he discusses my point about fudging constitutional nomenclature. What I was hoping to convey was not a sense that “strict construction” can be followed “out a window” (though I agree that it can), but rather that our government has a record of ignoring constitutional strictures based in shortsighted choices of vocabulary. The example of applying Fourth Amendment rights to telephone conversations represents a related, but different kind of judicial reasoning. A better example of what I’m talking about is how we recognize that Congress has the power to make rules for the U.S. Air Force, though the founding document only refers to its authority over “land and naval forces.” Let’s call it the “looks like a duck, quacks like a duck” theory of interpreting the Constitution. Mr. Gordon writes that “the District of Columbia is neither a state nor the functional equivalent of one. . . . If the capital were to move to, say, Omaha, the District of Columbia would be nothing more than Williamsburg, Virginia, writ large, within a week.” There’s an argument to be made that D.C. is not the “functional equivalent” of a state. The nation’s capital does, however, have a very substantial permanent population, an elected chief executive, a legislature, a local economy not dependent on the federal government, and a history and interests distinct from those of its surrounding environs. If the federal government left town, Washington would still possess many or all of these characteristics. There’s definitely room to argue that D.C. basically functions as a small, entirely urban state, similar in some ways to the Providence-dominated district—er, state—of Rhode Island. Now, I’ll reiterate that I am very much in agreement with John Steele Gordon that it would be best to upgrade D.C.’s voting rights through a constitutional amendment, rather than through a risky attempt to force action upon the Supreme Court. Joshua Zeitz’s view, though, that Congress’s approach to this issue is governed by “politics, and pure politics,” makes me wonder whether the Davis-Lieberman option, as it currently exists, isn’t worth a shot. The proposal is a unique, time-sensitive option, based entirely on the shortfall in congressional representation shared by both Utah and D.C. There’s an incentive for both Republicans and Democrats to support this bill. When it comes to a constitutional amendment, this is not so true. There are members of the Republican caucus in both houses of Congress (and one amazingly obtuse Democrat) who would go to the trenches rather than hand out a single new seat to Washington, D.C. Unfortunately, when the 2010 census comes along and congressional seats get reapportioned, the opportunity for relatively even-handed reform might disappear.
September 19, 2007
Washington, D.C. V Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 05:25 PM EST I’m not sure I want to engage John Steele Gordon on the question of whether D.C. statehood has faltered because of race politics, though I’ll admit to being extremely skeptical of his insistence that race and racism play no role in the matter. Some 58 percent of Washington residents are African-Americans, and 8 percent are Latinos. I have a difficult time imagining that the country would be so sanguine about the disenfranchisement of a federal district where two thirds of the citizens were white. At the end of the day, however, I think it’s politics, and pure politics, that drives the process. Many Republicans are unwilling to create a new Democratic seat in the House; they are certainly unwilling to create two new Democratic seats in the Senate. Where I’m willing to venture some disagreement with Mr. Gordon is over his suggestion that allowing Washington, D.C. two members of the Senate would constitute “grotesquely disproportionate representation in Congress. A middle-size city, with only 20 percent the area and less than 10 percent of New York City’s population would have had two senators of its very own, without even any suburbs to counterbalance the company town’s interest in an ever-expanding federal government and an ever increasing concentration of power there.” The current population of Washington, D.C., is about 581,000. Last year, Wyoming’s population was about 509,000. Vermont’s, 603,000. North Dakota’s, 636,000. Alaska’s, 663,000. All four states have two U.S. senators. What’s good for Wyoming is surely good for Washington, D.C. I’d also respectfully take issue with Mr. Gordon’s argument that Washington, D.C., is unusually vested in “an ever-expanding federal government and an ever increasing concentration of power there.” To be sure, the District’s bread and butter is the federal government. But was this not historically true of postwar Orange County, California, whose economic fortunes were so closely tied to federal defense spending and to federal irrigation and water projects, or vast swaths of the South, which relied on the federal government for subsidized electricity, dam projects, and agricultural subsidies? Moreover, including suburban Virginia and Maryland in metropolitan Washington’s political equation hardly dilutes the electorate’s interest in an expansive federal state. I would venture a guess that most people in the greater D.C. area who rely directly or indirectly on the federal government for their livelihoods actually live outside of the District.
September 19, 2007
Washington, D.C. IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:40 PM EST Alexander Burns writes that “I don’t think this will be the last we hear of this subject.” I certainly hope not, as the people of Washington are not getting what they are entitled to, which is representation—and a vote—in the Congress. My objection was the manner in which the bill was trying to achieve it and The New York Times’s airy indifference to the constitutional problems the bill presented. He is, of course, perfectly right that to take every word of the Constitution in a strictly literal way—to follow “strict construction” out a window—would make it unworkable. It would need to be constantly amended, and the amending process is deliberately difficult, requiring supermajorities in both houses of Congress and among the states. He mentions the power to “coin money” and notes that the government these days prints, not coins, quite a lot of the stuff. No serious person would argue that the Bureau of Printing and Engraving is engaged in a massively unconstitutional enterprise. As far as I know, no one has sued over the matter, as paper money is the functional equivalent of coins and a lot handier. (Of course, in a few years, the government will be out of the money business altogether, other than adjusting bank reserve requirements, but that’s another post.) In the 1920s the Supreme Court ruled that the government, under the Fourth Amendment, needed a warrant to tap a telephone, despite the fact that the Founding Fathers had never heard of a telephone. Tapping a phone is the functional equivalent of entering someone’s home and hiding behind the curtains in order to listen in to private conversations, and therefore a warrant is required. The ruling, I think, is fully in accord with the reasoning behind the Fourth Amendment. But the District of Columbia is neither a state nor the functional equivalent of one. It is, rather, the world’s largest company town, existing of, by, and for, the federal government. If the capital were to move to, say, Omaha, the District of Columbia would be nothing more than Williamsburg, Virginia, writ large, within a week. Thirteen states ratified the Constitution to join the Union and the other 37 were admitted by act of Congress. And though the telephone was unknown to the Founding Fathers, they quite specifically mentioned a district to serve as the seat of the federal government. Had they meant it to be treated as a state they would have said so. They didn’t. While it is certainly possible to follow strict construction out a window, it is even easier to start changing the essence of the Constitution by ignoring what it clearly says in order to achieve more easily some noble goal. Before long, there simply would be no Constitution beyond what nine unelected judges across Capitol Hill from the Congress say it is this year. Again, I note that amending the Constitution to give the District of Columbia the representation it is morally entitled to should not be that difficult. The amendment that gave the citizens of D.C. the right to vote in presidential elections was ratified in record time because people recognized it as the right thing to do. It was, to coin a phrase, fundamentally fair. But an amendment passed by Congress in 1978 did not fare so well. It read: Section 1. For purposes of representation in the Congress, election of the President and Vice President, and article V of this Constitution, the District constituting the seat of government of the United States shall be treated as though it were a State. Section 2. The exercise of the rights and powers conferred under this article shall be by the people of the District constituting the seat of government, and as shall be provided by the Congress. Section 3. The twenty-third article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed. Section 4. This article shall be inoperative, unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years from the date of its submission. Note that the amendment calls for the District of Columbia to be treated “as though it were a state,” the use of the subjunctive mood being a clear admission that it is not one. This amendment died when only 16 of the required 38 states ratified it in the time period allowed by Section 4. Why did it fare so poorly, when the Twenty-third Amendment sailed through ratification in record time? Because it would have given D.C. grotesquely disproportionate representation in Congress. A middle-size city, with only 20 percent the area and less than 10 percent of New York City’s population would have had two senators of its very own, without even any suburbs to counterbalance the company town’s interest in an ever-expanding federal government and an ever increasing concentration of power there. The amendment I propose would avoid that problem and, I fearlessly predict, would easily win ratification. Joe Lieberman and Tom Davis should introduce it.
September 19, 2007
Washington, D.C. III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:15 AM EST John Steele Gordon’s post inspired me to dig lightly into the historical and legal debate over the status of Washington, D.C. Mr. Gordon believes that the proposed compromise to offer both the District and the State of Utah a new, voting member of the House of Representatives violates Article I, Section 2 and Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. “The members of the House are to be chosen by ‘the People of the several States,’” Mr. Gordon explains, “and the District of Columbia is not a state, and this bill does not make it one.” If we were to apply a strictly literal interpretation of the Constitution, as some legal scholars and politicians argue we should do, then Mr. Gordon’s reading of Sections 2 and 8 might well preclude the possibility of granting Washington, D.C., a vote in Congress by statute, rather than by Constitutional amendment. But two centuries of American jurisprudence have established plenty of definitional wiggle room. At various times, our courts have located “penumbras” and “emanations” in the Bill of Rights that create “zones of privacy” where none explicitly exists. We’ve equated “persons” with corporations. We’ve broadened the concept of free “speech” to include actions and expressions that would never qualify as the spoken word in any respectable English-language dictionary. As Charles Evans Hughes once put the matter, “The Constitution is what the Supreme Court says it is.” There are long and complicated traditions that seek to locate meaning in the Constitution’s historical and evolutionary contexts. This is precisely why the proposed legislation that was blocked yesterday in the Senate included a provision to fast-track the process of judicial review and thereby ascertain the constitutionality of the law. In 1910 George Hodgkin wrote an article for the Political Science Quarterly entitled “The Constitutional Status of the District of Columbia.” It was, I think, one of the first modern scholarly attempts to analyze this complicated issue. At the time Hodgkin wrote his article, the pressing question was whether the District should enjoy home rule, which is a somewhat different question from whether it should be granted a vote in Congress. But the issues do overlap. Hodgkin examined the records of the Constitutional Convention and concluded that the framers “did not seek to deprive the people of the District of Columbia of their political privileges. The sole aim of that body was to secure the national government from state interference.” Given the novelty of the new federal system, Congress was concerned that if the capital were located in a particular state or divided between a group of states, the new national government would have difficulty exercising sovereignty. Hodgkin surmised that “in view of certain alleviating circumstances, more potent then than now, the Convention felt itself justified in sacrificing some of the political privileges of the people to the security of the national government; but certainly this sacrifice was anything but an end sought. It was found necessary to sacrifice participation in national affairs, since the machinery for it apparently could not be placed in operation under the peculiar plan whereby the capital was separated from the states; but the Convention certainly did not contemplate the irrevocable perpetuation of this sacrifice if some means of placing that machinery in operation should appear in later years under changed conditions.” Since 1787 the machinery of government has undergone sweeping change. In the eighteenth century few Americans were enfranchised; today most are. In 1868 the Fourteenth Amendment established the concept of dual citizenship, and in the twentieth century, the Court used this amendment to incorporate most of the Bill of Rights. Voting rights are now far more sacrosanct than they were 200 or even 100 years ago. What’s more, Congress has long granted the District a non-voting delegate, and her status (the incumbent is Eleanor Holmes Norton) is more complicated than the term “non-voting delegate” would suggest. House rules allow Norton to vote in and chair committees and subcommittees; she is allowed to serve on and vote in conference committees; she is also able to vote on legislation when the House meets in the Committee of the Whole. Since bills are often amended in the Committee of the Whole before moving onto a final vote (in which Norton is not permitted to participate), this allowance has more than symbolic power. Are these measures unconstitutional? According to the logic of Mr. Gordon’s argument, quite possibly so. If the District is not a state, then it should no more be permitted to seat a voting delegate on congressional committees than the editorial board of American Heritage magazine (also not a state). This is probably a more complicated question than it first appears, and since Congress has been unwilling to remedy—or incapable of remedying—the disenfranchisement of several hundred thousand citizens (most of whom are black), it may be high time for the Court to sort out the mess once and for all.
September 19, 2007
Washington, D.C. II Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:55 AM EST John Steele Gordon wrote an interesting post about the dilemma of granting congressional voting rights to citizens of Washington, D.C. Mr. Gordon suggests that the current proposal under consideration by the Senate is “patently unconstitutional,” since, for the purposes of electing the House of Representatives, it would treat the District of Columbia as a state even though it has not been admitted to the Union as such. I agree with him that this raises a serious legal hurdle for the bill. Naturally, I have a few points to make in response. First, I’m not so sure that the motivating philosophy behind this bill—what Mr. Gordon guesses The New York Times might call “fundamental fairness”—is essentially a coded rationale for “doing as liberals please.” Tom Davis, the author of the bill in the House of Representatives, is a Republican who ran his party’s congressional campaign committee for three election cycles. He’s not exactly a Maureen Dowd liberal, and yet he defended the bill with rhetoric that almost makes the Times editorial look wimpy. He asked, “How can we fight to bring democracy to Baghdad and not do the same for D.C.?” The proposal’s lead sponsor in the Senate, Joe Lieberman, is neither a Democrat nor a Republican. Like Davis, however, he’s clearly not a left-winger. If there are people dodging constitutional issues here, it’s not because they’re succumbing to a vice of the left, much less trying to promote “everything that is wrong with modern liberalism.” It’s because they see the opening for what Mr. Gordon rightly terms “a classic political compromise,” and they are attempting to strike while the legislative iron is hot. Second, I am pretty unmoved by the assertion that “the fundamental law of the land” unambiguously bars a bill like this from taking effect. The history of constitutional law is filled with intellectually crafty interpretive shifts, authored by people of all ideological stripes. And few serious people would disagree that the Constitution’s practical meaning has evolved in important ways over the last few centuries. One of the simplest ways that the Constitution has changed has been through governmental decisions to ignore certain delicacies of nomenclature. A constitutional law professor of mine once pointed out that the Constitution only empowers the government to “coin” money, not to “print” it. Fortunately, we’ve decided that printing and coining are functionally the same thing, and thus avoided having to carry around duffle bags full of quarters when we go shopping. I’m not sure that I’d endorse a similar approach to dealing with the question of whether our nation’s capital is a “district” or a “state,” but it’s not unimaginable that a sympathetic Supreme Court could see fit to elide the difference in this case. (For a good discussion of the distinction between states and districts, see this video from The Colbert Report.) As Mr. Gordon points out, this kind of resolution would raise the question of why D.C. still wouldn’t have senators. But while Davis and Lieberman’s legislation may not be perfect, it should at least be recognized for calling attention to an issue that deserves more attention from the federal legislature. Their bill was blocked last evening (by yet another GOP-led filibuster, rather than what Republicans used to call a “fair up-or-down vote”), but I don’t think this will be the last we hear of this subject.
September 18, 2007
Washington, D.C. Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:05 PM EST The Senate will try today to invoke cloture in order to pass a bill that would give Washington, D.C., a vote in the House of Representatives. While I’m fully in favor of the people of Washington having a voice in Congress equal to that of other American citizens, I am not in favor of this means of giving it to them. The bill would increase the size of the House from 435 to 437 and give one seat to Washington and one seat to Utah, which missed by a hair getting an extra seat in the 2000 census. Washington would elect a Democrat and Utah, presumably, would elect a Republican, so the balance of power would not be shifted. It is a classic political compromise. There’s only one problem: It is patently unconstitutional. Article I, Section 2, states, “The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second year by the People of the several States . . . .” Article I, Section 8, gives to Congress the power “to exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States . . . become the Seat of the Government of the United States . . .” The members of the House are to be chosen by “the People of the several States,” and the District of Columbia is not a state, and this bill does not make it one. The law would certainly end up in the Supreme Court, which would, I hope, throw it out. This would put the whole business back to square one, only with increased hard feelings. Were the Supreme Court, unaccountably, to let it stand, would it end the matter? Not likely. As soon as the representative of the District of Columbia took his or her seat in the House, agitation would immediately start to give the District representation in the Senate. Artful political compromise would be harder to achieve there. The New York Times has an editorial today on the subject that is a classic example of all that is wrong with modern liberalism. Here’s what it has to say on the constitutional issue: “Opponents continue to raise constitutional issues about the district’s not being a full-fledged state; proponents offer counterarguments about Congress’s long history of dominating, even dictating, the city’s precise political freedoms.” First, the District is not a state in any way shape or form, still less a full-fledged one. Second, the Times has a very strange notion of what constitutes a counterargument. It simply ignores the inconvenient constitutional argument and changes the subject to point out, correctly, that the District has been unfairly under the thumb of Congress for 200 years. I guess the Times is arguing that the Constitution should just be ignored in the cause of “fundamental fairness,” which is liberalspeak for doing as liberals please. If there is a constitutional argument in favor of this bill, the Times does not deign to give it. I suspect if there were one, it would have. The Times writes, “This will likely end up in the courts, but what could be closer to the ideals of America’s democracy than giving D.C. taxpayers their long-denied representation?” How about obeying the fundamental law of the land? Most despicably, the Times writes, “A minimum of 60 votes is required, and it would be a grim echo of segregationist history if the Senate denied this opportunity to advance the district’s voting rights.” Isn’t that neat? Vote against this unconstitutional bill and you are a segregationist. The blithe liberal assumption that anyone who disagrees with a liberal position must, ipso facto, be a moral eunuch, is perhaps degenerate modern-day liberalism’s most pervasive and pathetic tendency. Why not fix the problem the old fashioned way, with a constitutional amendment? Here’s a proposed amendment that would give the people of Washington, D.C., exactly the same standing in federal elections as every other American citizen Amendment XXVIII Section 1 The twenty-third article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed. Section 2 For purposes of participating in elections for President, Senators, and Representatives, the citizens of the district constituting the seat of the government of the United States shall be regarded and counted as citizens of the states that ceded the territory constituting the district. One might argue that amending the Constitution is a long, drawn-out process. That is not always the case. The 23rd Amendment, which gave the people of the District of Columbia the right to vote for President, but with no more electoral votes than the least populous state, was proposed by Congress on June 16, 1960. It was declared ratified only nine months later on March 29, 1961. No amendment has ever been ratified more quickly. One of its unfortunate side effects is that it made the number of presidential electors an even number, making it more likely that a close presidential election would end up in the House. The above amendment would solve that problem.
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