They also never intended for people to actually live in DC either…
JeremyDab on
Damn. Gottem
j--__ on
dc statehood is bad policy.
but what people forget is that dc was originally twice the size it is today. when a bunch of white people took up permanent residence in the southern portion of the district and couldn’t vote, the problem was solved by giving that land back to virginia, the state that had originally donated it, and where those people’s descendants are still voting to this day. the northern residential neighborhoods should have likewise been returned to maryland, the state that originally donated that land, but as it was only occupied by black people, white politicians couldn’t bring themselves to care.
51ngular1ty on
Easy fix asshole. Redraw the city limits to put 90% of the city population outside of D.C. I’ll even name the new territory for you.
Columbia.
No taxation without representation.
ariolander on
Women couldn’t vote before 1920 either. Or founding fathers were assholes. I don’t put much stock in their opinions about anything.
Yeshua_shel_Natzrat on
What the Founders *did* intend was for the Constitution to be changeable and for the people to have ultimate power in the land, precisely so that the people could choose to update and expand the values that the USA was founded on to include more people and affect greater equality and freedom, because they knew that would be an inevitability. Thomas Jefferson even wrote that the Constitution should be updated every 20 years to keep up with the updated sensibilities of the common public with each generation, to not be permanently bound by the sensibilities of the past.
roybum46 on
Pennsylvania?
imniahe on
supreme court be taking notes from this.
OffByOneErrorz on
I always get annoyed by this argument. The founders were very clear writing extensively on their thoughts about the Constitution being a living document.
Hazywater on
The minimum population of a state was 60,000 I think, so DC is already there. Meets all the criteria in fact.
Feuertotem on
Unfortunately they also agree here.
thejdobs on
You could apply this argument to any state that joined the union after the constitution was ratified. Are they going to argue that Texas was never intended to become a state?
dedokta on
Conservatives don’t like that either.
Choice-of-SteinsGate on
The founders didn’t have a fucking crystal ball…
So they also didn’t foresee that DC would become a massive district populated by 700,000 residents who would have NO voting representation.
Those residents also pay federal taxes and are subject to federal law.
“No taxation without representation” is literally the rallying cry of the American revolution.
The founders did include this in Article IV of the CONSTITUTION too:
> “New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union.”
Seems pretty straightforward to me.
And yeah, arguing about “original intent” goes both ways. So, unless you want to go around in circles about interpretations of that intent and what laws are and aren’t applicable today because they weren’t explicitly laid out 250 years ago, id cut your losses.
ManiaGamine on
Maybe people should stop caring about what a bunch of old white dudes from a long time ago said/wanted/thought. They aren’t alive now. A country is not and should not be immutable. Especially when its founding document literally has baked within it the capacity to change.
The whole idea of what the founders intended is ridiculous. Who gives a shit what the founders intended. Clearly not the Supreme Court given that they’ve now repeatedly thrown out explicitly defined parts of the Constitution despite not being Constitutionally empowered to do it.
doll-haus on
They also didn’t imagine it becoming the permanent domicile of a populous more than a quarter the size of *the entire fucking colonies at the time of the revolution*.
DC was built as two things:
1. As much as possible, an apolitical meet-up location for a band of relatively disparate communities that were effectively allies of convenience.
2. A distraction / trap for the inevitable British reprisals.
Both of those ships sailed *a long fucking time ago*. We could argue about when they became laughable, but I’d hold anyone claiming either was of significant value in the last hundred years to be completely out of touch with reality.
16 Comments
They also never intended for people to actually live in DC either…
Damn. Gottem
dc statehood is bad policy.
but what people forget is that dc was originally twice the size it is today. when a bunch of white people took up permanent residence in the southern portion of the district and couldn’t vote, the problem was solved by giving that land back to virginia, the state that had originally donated it, and where those people’s descendants are still voting to this day. the northern residential neighborhoods should have likewise been returned to maryland, the state that originally donated that land, but as it was only occupied by black people, white politicians couldn’t bring themselves to care.
Easy fix asshole. Redraw the city limits to put 90% of the city population outside of D.C. I’ll even name the new territory for you.
Columbia.
No taxation without representation.
Women couldn’t vote before 1920 either. Or founding fathers were assholes. I don’t put much stock in their opinions about anything.
What the Founders *did* intend was for the Constitution to be changeable and for the people to have ultimate power in the land, precisely so that the people could choose to update and expand the values that the USA was founded on to include more people and affect greater equality and freedom, because they knew that would be an inevitability. Thomas Jefferson even wrote that the Constitution should be updated every 20 years to keep up with the updated sensibilities of the common public with each generation, to not be permanently bound by the sensibilities of the past.
Pennsylvania?
supreme court be taking notes from this.
I always get annoyed by this argument. The founders were very clear writing extensively on their thoughts about the Constitution being a living document.
The minimum population of a state was 60,000 I think, so DC is already there. Meets all the criteria in fact.
Unfortunately they also agree here.
You could apply this argument to any state that joined the union after the constitution was ratified. Are they going to argue that Texas was never intended to become a state?
Conservatives don’t like that either.
The founders didn’t have a fucking crystal ball…
So they also didn’t foresee that DC would become a massive district populated by 700,000 residents who would have NO voting representation.
Those residents also pay federal taxes and are subject to federal law.
“No taxation without representation” is literally the rallying cry of the American revolution.
The founders did include this in Article IV of the CONSTITUTION too:
> “New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union.”
Seems pretty straightforward to me.
And yeah, arguing about “original intent” goes both ways. So, unless you want to go around in circles about interpretations of that intent and what laws are and aren’t applicable today because they weren’t explicitly laid out 250 years ago, id cut your losses.
Maybe people should stop caring about what a bunch of old white dudes from a long time ago said/wanted/thought. They aren’t alive now. A country is not and should not be immutable. Especially when its founding document literally has baked within it the capacity to change.
The whole idea of what the founders intended is ridiculous. Who gives a shit what the founders intended. Clearly not the Supreme Court given that they’ve now repeatedly thrown out explicitly defined parts of the Constitution despite not being Constitutionally empowered to do it.
They also didn’t imagine it becoming the permanent domicile of a populous more than a quarter the size of *the entire fucking colonies at the time of the revolution*.
DC was built as two things:
1. As much as possible, an apolitical meet-up location for a band of relatively disparate communities that were effectively allies of convenience.
2. A distraction / trap for the inevitable British reprisals.
Both of those ships sailed *a long fucking time ago*. We could argue about when they became laughable, but I’d hold anyone claiming either was of significant value in the last hundred years to be completely out of touch with reality.