H.R. 5388 is a bill before Congress that would give Utah an extra at-large representative in the House and give Washington, DC residents one representative in the House. The democratic party’s establishment is behind this bill, yet it denies Washington, DC residents representation in the senate and would render residents 1/3 represented in Congress. I decided to adjust the license plate accordingly….
Something to think about courtesy of Samuel Jordan:
HR 5388 proposes that the District’s new voting seat be “balanced” with a seat for Utah, although there is no crisis of democracy in Utah, one of the “reddest” and whitest states in the nation. “Balancing” is also one of the two traditional tactics employed to grant Congressional representation to a jurisdiction featuring a nonwhite numerical majority in its population. The tandem entry of Alaska and Hawaii in 1959 is the best example of this racial balancing. While we have been lead to believe that the purpose of balancing is the maintenance of partisan neutrality, the Congressional Record contains language that reveals the truth of the technique’s utility — nothing of value for non-whites without something of equal or greater value for whites.
Lyndon Baines Johnson, the powerful Senate Majority Leader, led the opposition to statehood for Hawaii. He feared that Hawaii would send a delegation to Congress that would “oppose segregation.” Other members of Congress were as direct in their concern that Hawaii’s Asian/Native Hawaiian majority was not sufficiently “American” to become a state. Even though Hawaii applied for statehood in 1903, it experienced the second-longest delay between application and grant — 56 years. Alaska, with its white majority, was admitted ahead of brown-skinned Hawaii — the only deal that Johnson would accept. Was racial balancing more important than political balancing?
The longest wait for the grant of statehood is the record held by New Mexico, 62 years. Is it merely coincidental that New Mexico, described in the April 1, 1876, Harper’s Weekly as “. . . an ignorant, foreign community under the influence of the Roman Church . . . nine tenths Mexicans, Indians, ‘greasers’ and other non-English speaking people. . . ,” did not become a state until the census of 1910 confirmed a white majority? This rejection of the nonwhite numerical majority until its replacement with a white majority is the second of the two traditional tactics used when a territory with a nonwhite majority population has sought to increase its political power through statehood. No other options have been available. This is the time-honored “rights by race rule” or more specifically, the “two tactics tradition.” Is it coincidental that all US territories with white majorities are called “states” and all the current US territories, including the District of Columbia, have nonwhite majorities and no realistic prospects of achieving statehood?
Reading this makes me feel like my little colonist outfit i like to wear represents more than taxation without representation, but that my whiteness makes me a colonizer in the last continental colony in America.
