DC Statehood: Now, More Than Ever

The Columbia district is not a state. It is the legally enigmatic, underseaned and officially disintegrated creation of a federal government which has a history of negligence of the needs and potential of the national capital. Donald Trump has now fully benefited from this circumstance to flood Washington with highly armed soldiers and masked federal agents.

Trump acknowledges that his decision to militarize the application of the law to DC disrupted the Americans. “They already say:” he is a dictator “, said Trump last week, after the start of military overvoltage. The president said he was simply trying to fight against an uncontrollable wave of crime. “The place goes to hell and we have to stop it,” he said. “So, instead of saying” he is a dictator “, they should say:” We will join him and make Washington safe “.”

But the claim of Trump’s crime is wrong. “There is no crime crisis at DC,” Rosa Brooks, a former DC metropolitan reserve police reserve, told Georgetown Law School. Brooks denounced the authoritarian authority of the president, saying: “It is the territory of the police state, the territory of the police state of the Republic of banana.”

Unfortunately, there is a considerable history of federal administrations and republican congresses entering the banana “territory of the State of the Republic of the Republic” with regard to DC.

Frederick Douglass admitted that there was a crisis of democracy in the national capital 135 years ago. The great abolitionist and social reformer, who taught that “power concedes nothing without a demand. He has never done it and he will never do it, ”was also ahead of his time when it was DC as he was in many other areas. He spent the last years of his life working with a group of pioneering voting rights, the Suffrage Petition Association district, to bring the promise and the protection of democracy to DC.

Douglass attended the group’s meetings and gatherings and asked: “What have the inhabitants of the district made them be excluded from the privileges of the ballot boxes?”

Several of the democratic reforms that Douglass pleaded during his remarkable life were carried out during the century after his death. Washington, today, has an elected mayor and municipal council, as well as the ability to vote (and choose voters) in the presidential elections.

However, 130 years after the death of Douglass, citizens of the Columbia district are still prevented from electing members of the voting congress.

The refusal of the franchise completes to citizens of the national capital is only an example of the Patchwork approach of suffrage in the United States, where Americans who live in the Commonwealth, territories and goods lack complete representation rights in the congress and, in most cases, to vote for the president. Even in the United States, the voting rights are poorly defined, and the law on voting rights, which is already weakened by the Supreme Court, is in the process of legal aggression – as the current thrust of Gerrymandering by the Republicans of Texas aligned by Trump illustrates so amply.

However, the Columbia district may have the most complex relationship with the voting rights of any American jurisdiction. Although residents of the district can vote in the presidential elections, they are not allowed to elect voting representatives in the House or the Senate. DC delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, the veteran militant of civil rights who campaigned for many years for the placement of the Douglass statue of 7 feet high which is now in the American Capitol, recalled when he was dedicated a dozen years ago which was appointed Douglass. The DC Council, part of the government of the Rule of origin, was given the district by the Republican Congress and the President during the reconstruction, as DC Recorder of Deeds and as American Marshal for the local and federal courts.