Back in September, I wrote an article entitled, “Democracy in DC: What Does It Matter.” Maybe you don’t feel the need for me to revisit the issues I raised there, but some of you are new readers, and besides, when I started writing this Substack last May I said that I wanted to make you understand why denying democracy in the seat of our national government fails to uphold the standards set at our founding. So it pays to circle back to this periodically.

I actually don’t know to what extent I’m preaching to the choir when I write my weekly essays. I value every subscriber and every reader, whatever your viewpoint, but unless I reach the skeptics, I’m not getting where I need to go. I actually hope that some of you reading this are starting from a perspective of total disagreement. By now you’ve probably been able to tell where I fall on the political spectrum, but please remember, as I wrote in one of my earliest posts, that the current partisan divide around DC’s future is not God-given, and has shifted repeatedly over time.

Wherever you stand politically, I hope you’re taking some time to ask yourself, in this historic year, how the values in the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution should guide us in the present day and into our future. Undeniably, all our best-known founders were white males and shaped by Christian culture, if not always by Christian orthodoxy. But if you’ve convinced yourself that a white, male, and Christian country is therefore our one true national value, then I have to encourage you to look at – really read – our founding documents. Even as they were debating and drafting, the founders were aware that they themselves were not living up to the aspirations expressed in those documents, and that subsequent generations would have to strive toward “a more perfect union” – which we have been doing, step by step, ever since.

We’ve made a great many changes over the past 250 years in how we apply our founding principles, so many changes that we couldn’t fully turn the clock back even if we tried. (Lots of you reading this now wouldn’t have the right to vote if we went back to our earliest days.) And when it comes to DC, there also have been many twists and turns. As I’ve pointed out earlier (The Constitution and Then Some and How Time Flies), the Constitution called for a federal district of up to ten miles square, but after that it was Congress that voted on the location of the district, and Congress that has changed the size, structure and governance of DC any number of times, all without amending the Constitution to do so. Only one constitutional amendment directly addresses DC’s status – the 23^rd, giving DC residents the right to vote in presidential elections starting in the 1960s. So right now, if Congress wanted to shrink the size of the federal district in order to accommodate a new US state, it could easily do so. (In 2016, DC voters favored petitioning Congress to become the 51^st state, but the effort has since failed twice.) And just as the 18^th amendment (prohibition) was repealed by the 21^st amendment, so too could the 23^rd amendment be repealed, since there would no longer be anyone other than the president (who generally votes in his home state) residing in a smaller federal district encompassing only federal buildings.

I’m going against the grain here, I know. Some of you may be unable to visualize such a change. Most people reading this have only known a US flag containing fifty stars. Other readers may take a broader view that we as a nation have simply gone too far, and we need to stop – freeze – things as they are, or even move backward. But in our history, the wheel turns, and there have been periods of stocktaking or even retrenchment, followed by periods of rapid change. When we’re again ready for change, I want you to consider that the denial of DC residents’ right to national representation should be part of the next big push forward.

That those of us living in DC – more people than in either Wyoming or Vermont - aren’t already part of the fabric of US democracy is due to a longstanding lack of political will at the national level, and that lack of political will is closely tied to the fact that DC has long had a large Black population. I strongly recommend that you read the book Chocolate City, by Derek Musgrove and Christopher Asch, which follows the city’s entire history and shows how interwoven it is with national-level issues of race. (Ironically, about the time that book was published, DC was losing its majority-Black status.)

I may not convince you to pick up a book, but at least you’re reading this essay. And I hope I’ve at least tickled your conscience enough to question whether the lack of Congressional representation for the people of DC can possibly be consistent with American values.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Founding-Fathers-Deism-and-Christianity-1272214

https://www.gilderlehrman.org/essays/historical-context/constitution-slavery

https://www.annenbergclassroom.org/23rd-amendment/#:~:text

https://ltamerica.org/america-at-250-our-stuck-constitution/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Washington,_D.C.,_statehood_referendum

https://uncpress.org/9781469654720/chocolate-city/

https://www.dcpolicycenter.org/publications/goodbye-to-chocolate-city/