The Room Where It Happens, Indeed
As the House readied its vote to make a new state out of the District of Columbia, the Speaker went before the press to dilate on injustice of what has obtained for the past 230 years. Mrs. Pelosi called the District “an affront to our democracy.” She noted that its residents pay taxes, serve in the military, and contribute to the “economic vitality” of America but lack for representation. “How could it be? Whose idea was that?”
It turns out that we know exactly whose idea it was. That’s because it was hatched at the very dinner party that, among other things, is now being immortalized anew in the Broadway blockbuster “Hamilton.” The dinner took place in 1790 at New York. It was no cabal of counter-revolutionary cads. The three persons in the room where it happened were Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison.
Jefferson, then secretary of state, was the host. He had famously encountered Hamilton outside President Washington’s office at lower Manhattan. Hamilton, Jefferson later wrote, looked “somber, haggard, and dejected.” That was owing to Congress having just rejected his plan for the federal government to assume the states’ debts from the Revolutionary War. So Jefferson offered to host a dinner with Madison.
The repast took place on June 20. The deal they struck was that Madison would support Hamilton’s plan to federalize the debt, while Hamilton would agree to putting the American capital at a spot along the Potomac. By the end of July, the House and Senate had passed the legislation. They acted under the constitutional grant to Congress of the power to accept such a district as ceded to the federal government by the states.
And to exercise over it “exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever.” Madison, in 43 Federalist, addressed the logic of this. He called the Congress’ “complete authority at the seat of government” an “indispensable necessity.” Without it, he reckoned, “public authority might be insulted and its proceedings interrupted with impunity.” Plus members of the government might develop a “dependence” on the local state.
Madison worried that such a dependence of the members of the general government on the surrounding state “might bring on the national councils an imputation of awe or influence, equally dishonorable to the government and dissatisfactory to the other members” of the Union. He fretted that such consideration would take on added weight with the “gradual accumulation of public improvements” in the capital district.
It’s not our purpose here to suggest that residents of the District of Columbia lack for complaints. Congress has known about those through the generations. Even when it was controlled by the Democrats, and with a Democrat in the White House, it has failed to allay them. Our only purpose is to address Mrs. Pelosi’s posers, “How could it be? Whose idea was that?” The truth is that she knows the answer; her motives are partisan.
Then again, too, she knows the dangers of placing the capital within a regular state. Just these past few weeks, we’ve watched the local protesters, even in a district controlled by Congress, try to buffalo the federal government, painting protest messages on the very streets leading to the White House. Such problems would only grow should the District be turned into a state — stranding the federal government within a state sovereignty in which injustices would be even harder for America to solve.
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