First Principles

"Allowing these antiquated rules to remain in place, long after the unequal treatment of American citizens has become constitutionally, morally and culturally unacceptable in the rest of our Nation... is an intolerable state of affairs which cannot be excused by hiding behind any theory of law." - Judge Juan Toruella, In Dissent, Igartua v. U.S.


When all the partisan bickering over made-up problems and bullshit non-issues that no one save a few well-heeled ideologue donors and the mentally illest among the commentariat could possibly spend time or energy concerning themselves with gets me down, I find it's best to take a step back and look at a political outrage so antithetical to American ideals that (I like to think) it must transcend party. There are approximately 5 million citizens of the United States who do not have representation in Congress. Most of them also do not have a say in presidential elections.


To put that in some perspective, the 544,270 people of Wyoming have a Representative and two Senators. The 599,657 people of Washington, D.C. have a non-voting Representative and no Senators.


Americans don't like to think of themselves as imperialists. It runs counter to the whole idea of the country. We fought a war against imperialists in order to gain independence. The main grievance that sparked that war was our status as British subjects with no say as to how we were governed. It is pretty difficult to reconcile our treatment of the citizens of Guam, Samoa, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. with our republican values, however. The people in our nation's capital can at least vote in the presidential elections, but other than that they are afforded no greater rights and privileges than the residents of the Mariana Islands. Governing far-flung territories without the participation of the people who actually live in those territories is about as close to a textbook definition of imperialism as we have.


This is inexcusable. A political solution will never happen, though. The reason? Pretty simple, actually. Giving the territories statehood would throw the Senate out of any possibility of balance. One of the reasons that Hawaii and Alaska were granted statehood at almost the exact same time was that Hawaii was solidly Democratic and Alaska Republican. Guam, for whatever reason, is relatively conservative, but not to the level of Alaska. And it would only offset one of the more Democratic territories. Would the mayor of Washington, D.C. and the governor of Puerto Rico have to fight in a cage match for statehood?


What would a compromise look like, though? Could we fold the territories in to existing states (D.C. becomes part of Maryland, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands go to Florida, Guam and Samoa to Hawaii)? Probably not, given that Florida would become solidly Democratic rather than continuing to hold its status as a clusterfuck swing state and any state that absorbed a territory would immediately become poorer. Also, the distance between Guam and Hawaii is greater than that between Hawaii and Texas. Logistics would be challenging.


So what then? Let them go and become countries in their own right? Well, why not? It seems unlikely that their respective governments would become enemies of the United States. The Communist Menace doesn't exist anymore, save countries that we are indebted to. I don't have an answer here, I just know that of all the reasons I have to be ashamed of my country, this is simultaneously the most fundamental and overlooked.