[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 65 (Wednesday, April 19, 2023)] [House] [Pages H1852-H1858] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Date: 2023-04-19
Chamber: HOUSE
Mr. RASKIN: I thank the gentlewoman for her point, and I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, control over local police is an essential facet of political self-government and home rule. The people of Washington, D.C., through their representatives, need to be able to control their own local police. They also need to control their judges. The problem, of course, is that right now the District of Columbia is caught betwixt and between. The people have made clear that they want to become a State. They organized a State and constitutional convention. They have petitioned for admission to the Union and are asking the Congress of the United States under Article IV of the Constitution to exercise our powers to admit them as a State and to redraw the boundaries of the Federal District given our exclusive power and our comprehensive power under the District clause to do that. In fact, in 1846, Congress redrew the boundaries of the District of Columbia in order to retrocede to Virginia lands there, and that was perfectly constitutional. Today Congress can exercise its powers under Article I, section 8, clause 17 to modify the boundaries of the Federal District to cede the residential lands to the new State that is petitioning for admission to the Union. The House of Representatives in the last two Congresses voted to admit the District of Columbia, or Washington, D.C., as the new State. The Senate did not act, yet their statehood drive continues. Alas, our colleagues, rather than trying to help propel another State into the Union and to allow them to gain equal footing with all of the other States instead decides to try to micromanage their local affairs and to drive them back into some kind of semi-colonial status that they thought they had left behind many decades ago. So the real question for the Congress of the United States is: Will we do for the people of Washington, D.C.--taxpaying, draftable citizens who have served in every war that the Republic has ever fought going back to the American Revolution--will we treat them the same way that we treated the people of 37 other States who were admitted by the original 13? That is the dynamic of enlargement of democracy that was contemplated by the Framers of the Constitution and the Founders of the country. They did not want there to be large, colonized, and subjected populations subject to the will of other people for precisely the kind of reason that is on display today. There is no reason why the local government of Washington should be lorded over and superintended by other people's Representatives no matter how well-intended they may be or how politically intended they may be or how malevolently intended they may be. The Framers of the Constitution and the people who fought the American Revolution rejected the idea of virtual representation. That was the claim of the crown and the Parliament. They said: You don't need your own representatives because you are represented by people in Parliament who will be able to take into account your interests. The revolutionaries rejected that saying that in real democracy people get to choose their own representatives, and those representatives elect their own council and their own mayor, and they get to choose their own police chief. They get to make their own decisions. So really what we see today is a drama that reenacts the basic struggle for democratic self-government in our country. This is a chapter in that drama, but it will lead eventually--it must lead--to the admission of Washington, D.C., as a new State the way that 37 other States were admitted by the original 13, including my own Maryland, because those original States understood the logic of democratic equality and freedom in our country. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.