OFormer U.S. President Donald Trump’s most powerful action in the U.S. Stacey Plaskett of the Virgin Islands, the first representative of the American region to hold the position of impeachment manager.
Yet Plasket’s position meant he was unable to vote on Trump’s impeachment because he did not have a vote on the floor of the House of Representatives. U.S. The Virgin Islands have no representation in the Senate. Its residents cannot even vote for the president.
The discrepancy highlights America’s long disorganized colonial history of leaving five territories floating in constitutional organs, effectively treating its inhabitants – most of them people of color – as second-class citizens.
But with the pace of last summer’s protests against racial injustice and the Democratic presidential election, one of the territories – Puerto Rico – aims to become the union’s 51st state. A parallel effort by Washington Washington, Columbia District (DC) is also closer to its same goal.
“It’s very important to take a step back and see who has real representation in a democracy.” Stasha Rhodes, Campaign Manager for 51 to 51, an organization pushing for DC Statues. “If you think about all the players mentioned, they all have one thing in common: they are people of all colors. Is there true democracy in America if many people of color stand out and are not able to fully participate? ”
The United States has five colonies: Samoa, Guam, the Northern Marina Islands, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands. People born in regions other than American Samoa are U.S. citizens and pay federal taxes, such as Medicare and Social Security, though not federal taxes on locally received income. Each constituency sends a representative to the House who can discuss the law and sit on committees but is not really able to vote.
Puerto Rico was a Spanish colony until 1898, when it came under U.S. control as part of the terms ending the Spanish-American War. The Puerto Ricans were annexed by the Jones Act in 1917. Citizenship was granted and it became the U.S. Commonwealth in 1952 – but still without voting in the U.S. presidential election.
Over the past half-century, Puerto Rico has held six non-binding referendums on its position and voted 52% -47% in favor of the state last November, boosted in 2017 by complaints about the federal government’s inappropriate response to Hurricane Maria. In an interview with Axis on HBO last week, Governor Pedro Pierre Luisi said “Congress is obliged to respond morally” and predicted that the House bill would be introduced next month.
Jorge Los Garcia, executive director of the Puerto Rico Statehood Council, said: “There is a group of people who make decisions on behalf of the people of Puerto Rico about the wishes and ideas and perspectives of the elected officials of your choice. Basically taboo colonialism.
“We had Hurricane Maria and the earthquake and now Kovid and, in all these cases when Puerto Rico needs federal resources, federal support, federal action, we don’t have the ability to hold elected officials in Washington accountable for what they do because they are Puerto Rico. Never get a vote from Rico, and that includes the president as well as members of Congress. “
It is Congress that must first approve the formation of any new state after Hawaii in 1959.
The move comes as Republicans seize the unconstitutional power to give Democrats two extra seats in the Senate. Arizona’s next senator, Martha Malley Castle, told NBC News last year that while Puerto Rico should get a state of the state, Republicans would “never get a Senate again”.
Although Democrats control the House, the state bill faces a very difficult path in an evenly divided Senate, where 60 votes are needed to thwart a Republican filibuster “kill switch.” Although progressives drew attention to Phillipsster’s racist history, only key Democrats, Man Manchin and Kristen Cinema, were reluctant to remove it.
Garcia added: “The prospects of the state are incredibly challenging, but they have been challenging for every other region that has been accepted as a state. In my lifetime, those are definitely the best obstacles we can meet. “
Almost all of Puerto Rico’s residents are Hispanic, while half of DC’s are African American. But as the country’s capital, DC comes from a distinct historical, historical, economic and constitutional perspective.
Its 700,000 plus population – more than the population of Vermont and Wyoming – pays more per capita in federal income tax than any other state. He won the right to vote in the 1961 presidential election but still lacks a voice in the House of Representatives or the Senate.
The movement for a DC state is bigger and more streamlined than ever before. The House passed a bill last June that approved, for the first time, a chamber of Congress advancing the DC status measure. He never stood a chance in the Republican-controlled Senate, but Black Lives Matter protests in Washington and Washington gave the cause more power.
Rhodes of Odes1 said in For1:
Our most prominent civil rights leaders were fighting for entry into democracy. If you think about John Lewis and Martin Luther King, they were all fighting for access to voting and representation and so here we are fighting for a clear opportunity for equal representation and participation in democracy in 2021 in Washington DC. “
One major hurdle was removed when Trump promised “DC will never be a state,” as the choice of Democratic senators would be certain, as he was defeated in the presidential election by Biden, who backed the campaign. Was.
Then on January 6 the U.S. There was a revolt in the Capitol. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters earlier this month: “If Columbia can act as a district state, what any governor can do is call the National Guard without the approval of the federal government. It should not be done that way. “
Eleanor Holmes Norton, a non-voting member of the House in the House, reintroduced the state bill last month, while Delaware Democratic Senator Tom Carper reintroduced his fellow state bill, which currently has 39 Democratic sponsors.
Megan Hatcher-May, The director of undivided democratic policy for the grassroots movement, said: “It’s a matter of basic principle. DC is not all government officials and lawyers. Here are the real real people, many of whom were tasked with cleaning up the mess of the January 6 uprising. They are residents of DC and they have no votes in Congress at all and so I think it would be very easy for every Democrat in the Senate to say the wrong thing. “
Hatcher-Maze, a former assistant at Holmes Norton, added: “We need to eliminate Philibuster to make DC the 51st state. We are the closest to getting the DC status and, if that is to happen, this is going to be Congress, and it is really going to happen or the Senate is in trouble. It is not really a nationwide representation and will go a long way in correcting the problem of making DC a state. ”
The issue highlights the Senate’s democratic deficit, where small predominantly white states get two seats, with as much weight as large, ethnically diverse states like California. In 2018, New York Times opinion columnist David Leonhard calculated that the Senate represents an average of 75% of the average Black American, and only 55% of the average Hispanic American.
Moreover, in the Senate’s 232-year history there have been only 11 black senators and Plesket was the only elected black woman in the impeachment hearing. In such a context, Republicans have been protesting against the state to save the white minority regime.
Latosha Brown, co-founder of Black Waters Matter, said: “At the end of the day, you have states from Utah to Montana that have gotten an early state with fewer critics, less questionable than DC and Puerto Rico. It is a fundamental democratic flaw and it punishes hypocrisy. The only reason to have that discussion or question is who makes the majority of those two places”
An earlier bid for DC statehood in the Democratic-controlled House in 1993 reluctantly defeated President Bill Clinton by nearly 2-1. This time, Biden prioritizes racial justice, his mood is different. There is a sense that Democrats’ control of the White House, the Senate and the House provides a historic opportunity.
Donna Brazil, former interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, said: “It’s about making America a more complete union. It is the oldest constitutional democracy in the world and yet some citizens do not have the full right to vote because of where they live. If we end racial injustice in America and talk about a new beginning for the country, we will not be able to move the old issues forward. “
