alternative hippopotamus

progressive cyberdadaism from our nation’s capital

April 24, 2007

People Against The DC Vote, And The People Who Hate Them

by AltHippo @ 5:31 pm. Filed under Life in D.C.

Surprise, surprise, the NRO hacks are against congressional representation for the District. Talk about legal opinions that write themselves.

While there is more diversity in opposition at this Volokh Conspiracy thread, it’s clear that they don’t like the idea. Plus, they seem to think that if residents of the District don’t like it, they can move. Ignoring the fact that moving is a very disrupting life experience, particularly if you’ve lived here all your life, I think it’s odd that someone would say that if you want to participate in society you need to leave your community.

Below the Beltway exhibits what I’ll call business casual partisanship as opposed to naked partisanship: “Davis, the Democrats, and the District are all ignoring the Constitution and trying to use this legislation as a means to circumvent the Amendment process, where they know they could not succeed.”

BtB is probably right that an Amendment along the lines of the current bill wouldn’t succeed. Turning DC into a state isn’t going to happen either. Retrocession is unpopular with Maryland, so that’s off the table. In fact, nothing will work. It’s not in the cards. It’s the fait of the nation’s capital to lack representation in government.

Now, I tend to believe that last thing I said doesn’t make any sense. So I’m going to take a stand that may sound controversial. I really don’t care if the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional. It’s probably as reasonable a solution as we can come up with. I’m proposing that we just look the other direction.

Allow me to explain. Ever so often there’s an episode of Law and Order where the Sam Waterston character has the evidence to put somebody away, but there’s some extenuating circumstance, like the guy’s going to die in six months, or he didn’t know the gun was loaded, or the person who was killed was a jerk. So he chooses not to persecute. Nobody, and I even include the NRO hacks when I say this, screams at the tv set: “But he broke the law. He must be punished.” No. Everyone shrugs their shoulders, and says: “Whatcha gonna do. Sometimes life is messy.”

Or, to put it slightly differently, I think there are degrees of constitutionality and unconstitutionality. For instance, I thought the Dread Scott decision was very unconstitutional. Even though we thought it was constitutional at the time. If there was a law requiring someone to recite the first 10 amendments to the Constitution before being allowed to vote, or the 10 Commandments if you live in Alabama, that would also be unconstitutional. But only a little bit.

I’m just saying that the merit of voter representation outweights the degree to which the Voting Rights Act may or may not be constitutional. Sometimes the disease really is worse than the cure.

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3 Responses to “People Against The DC Vote, And The People Who Hate Them”

  1. Doug Mataconis Says:
    April 24th, 2007 at 11:13 pm

    Thanks for the link. Interesting argument.

    You’ll find my response here.

  2. AltHippo Says:
    April 25th, 2007 at 12:27 am

    I’ve tried replying at the BtB site, but to no avail. There’s a thingy that keeps people who spell “fate” as “fait” from posting.

  3. Doug Mataconis Says:
    April 25th, 2007 at 7:39 am

    There shouldn’t be any problem with commenting. I do have moderation turned on for people who haven’t commented before, but other than that you should be fine.

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