Constitution

Benghazi and Madison

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I was too busy at work to watch any of Mrs. Clinton’s testimony at the Benghazi hearings yesterday, so I did the next best thing and checked out Twitter periodically to see the partisans on both sides of the media defend their standard-bearer. I obviously fall on one side of that line, but the willful blindness of the reporters in the Clinton camp was more difficult to take than usual.

Most of the press support her party in the upcoming elections, and that’s neither surprising nor likely to change, but pretending not to understand the problem here, and pretending to be shocked at the partisanship of the hearings is absurd. Some of us have memories that predate January 2009, and we recall that Congress has always, always had partisan hearings. It’s the whole nature of check and balances.

Part of the genius of our system of government is that it is designed to be carried out by self-interested people and factions. Our founding fathers did not delude themselves into thinking that only the purest of men would lead the nation; to the contrary, they knew that people craved power, and they set up a Constitution that would use that desire to help us govern.

A Congress jealous of the executive’s strength is going to use its powers, including the power of investigation, to limit that executive. They will do this not because they are paragons of virtue, but because they want that power for themselves. And it works! Congresses investigate presidential wrongdoing. Is it political? Yes! And that’s a good thing! Politics is the way a free people governs itself.

James Madison put it best in Federalist 51:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

Mankind is imperfect and antagonistic, but in their mutual antagonism, the branches of government check each others abuses and preserve the people’s liberty. That’s what we saw today, and that’s what we’ll see in the next administration, and the one after that, and the one after that. Today, whether anyone will admit it or not, the system worked.

Voting in Washington

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I originally published this post at a former group blog, The Closet Moderate, in 2013.

I’ve been thinking about Washington, D.C. and its unusual quasi-colonial status.

People in what became the District of Columbia had voting rights as citizens of Maryland and Virginia until 1801, when the District was incorporated.  In 1847, the federal government retroceded the Virginia portion of the District to that Commonwealth, so the voters their got back their rights as citizens of Virginia.  Citizens of what remained of the federal district did not.  In 1961, the states approved the Twenty-Third Amendment, which granted the citizens of Washington three electoral votes for President and Vice President.  By that time, Congress had also given the District home rule, which guaranteed them some of the control over local affairs that a state has, though not all of it, and not in any way that couldn’t be rescinded by Congress.

L'Enfant_plan

That still left Congressional representation.  Although Washington elects a delegate to the House of Representatives, she has no vote.  In 1978, Congress sought to remedy this problem by passing another amendment to the Constitution that would have treated the District as a state for purposes of representation in Congress.  It went over like a lead balloon, with only sixteen of the necessary thirty-eight states approving the amendment before time expired in 1985.

Since then, several bills have been introduced in Congress that would admit Washington as a state, but none have come close to passage, and there is some doubt about whether it would even be constitutional without Maryland’s permission.

Several other options have been proposed.  Retroceding the remaining District to Maryland is one solution  and Representative Regula of Ohio regularly proposed bills to that effect, but none were successful.  There was also some question as to whether Maryland would want it back.  Further, the Twenty-Third Amendment would be nonsensical without a federal district, and would need to be repealed.

So as long as a Constitutional amendment is required, here’s my solution: let the people of Washington vote as though they were Marylanders in federal elections, but not in state elections. That sounds like it violates all sorts of constitutional provisions, but it’s an amendment, so we can mostly do whatever we want. I even wrote a draft of the text, if you’re into that sort of thing:

AMENDMENT XXVIII

§1. For the purpose of election of the President, Vice President, Senators, and Representatives, and for the purpose of apportionment of Representatives, the residents of the District constituting the seat of the government of the United States shall be treated as residents of the State from which that District shall have been ceded.
§2. The Twenty-Third Article of Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.
§3.  This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of three-fourths of the States within seven years from the date of submission.

This gives everybody something.  To those who think the District shouldn’t be a state: it still isn’t.  For those Washingtonians who want voting representatives in both Houses of Congress: you got it.  For Democratic officeholders in Maryland: your re-election just got easier.  Democrats in Congress: you just got a new House member.  Republicans in Congress: yeah, they got an extra member, but you didn’t give up any Senate seats, and Maryland’s Senate seats have both been held by Democrats for the last twenty-six years, anyway.  Republicans in Maryland state government: yeah, you guys would kinda get screwed.  Sorry.