How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [153]
Congress legislates in all cases directly on the local concerns of the District [of Columbia]. As this is a departure, for a special purpose, from the general principles of our system, it may merit consideration whether an arrangement better adapted to the principles of our Government and the particular interests of the people may not be devised, which will neither infringe the Constitution nor affect the object which the provision in question was intended to secure.
—PRESIDENT JAMES MONROE1
In 1990 Eleanor Holmes Norton was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a nonvoting delegate from the District of Columbia. She and others maintain that the status of the District, whose local laws can be repudiated or imposed by Congress, replicates that of the colonists for whom taxation without representation ignited the American Revolution. The similarity can be seen in a 1774 resolution of New Hampshire colonists, expressing support for the Boston Tea Party. “To send us their teas, subject to a duty [tax] on landing here,” the resolution stated, England “testified a disregard to the interests of Americans.… This town approves the general exertions and noble struggles … for preventing so fatal a catastrophe as is implied in taxation without representation.”2
Some Americans, however, disagree with this comparison. They maintain that the status of the District of Columbia is embedded in the Constitution. Among the powers given to Congress in Article I is the authority to “exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States.” Implicit in this clause is the fact that the nation’s capital is not a state.
How did this predicament come to be? Its underlying cause was reported in the Philadelphia Gazetteer in 1783, prior to the existence of Washington, DC:
Several of the disbanded [Revolutionary War] soldiers have, for some days past, been clamorous for this pay.… On Saturday last, about two or three hundred of them hostilely appeared before the State-house [present-day Independence Hall] and handed in … their demands in writing, accompanied with a threat.… The Congress … hastily resolved to exchange their old sitting place for the more salubrious air of Princeton, in the State of New Jersey … having received no satisfactory assurances for expecting adequate and prompt exertion of the State [of Pennsylvania] for supporting the dignity of the federal government.
Five years later, when Congress replaced the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution, it penned Article I, Section 8, reserving for itself exclusive jurisdiction over the District of Columbia to assure it would never again be at the mercy of a state for its own protection.
Even at the time, however, the status of the District of Columbia was controversial. The record of the debate over the proposed Constitution states:
Mr. George Mason thought there were few clauses in the Constitution so dangerous as that which gave Congress exclusive power of legislation with ten miles square.… It is an incontrovertible axiom that, when the dangers that may arise from the abuse are greater than the benefits that may result from the use, the power ought to be withheld. I do not conceive that this power is at all necessary, though capable of being greatly abused.
No less a figure than James Madison disagreed:
How could the general government be guarded from undue influence of particular states, or from insults, without such exclusive power?… If this commonwealth depended, for the freedom of deliberation, on the laws of any state where it might be necessary to sit, would it not be liable to attacks of that nature, and with more indignity, which have already been offered to Congress?
Eleanor Holmes Norton (1937-) (photo credit 44.1)
Patrick Henry—most remembered for declaring “Give me liberty or give me death!”—brought that same fervor to the debate over the status of the District: