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Tagged: Washington

Political / The law

Some of my favorite things: debauchery, sterility, and Utahns

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed riling up my friends on the left, Marcus Banks and Venezuelan Army Maj. Marty Stroodler, over the issue of D.C. voting rights.  To Justme, I would retort that holding a sign reading “Will Make Political Commentary for Money,” and actually eating because of it, is a wonderful dream.

Washington, D.C., which the Supreme Court relegated to mere and literal footnote status last week, is clearly a banana republic that should be squelched until it learns its lesson.

Well, I’m kidding somewhat.  In all this debate, I have been disappointed that no one took up for Washington as a normal American city.  When I criticized the city for having no industry to speak of, I was sure I would hear “XM Radio!”  (In truth, I just tried to think of another employer to include here that wasn’t 1) out on I-66 or I-270, 2) government, 3) quasi-government, 4) education, or 5) food, and I couldn’t do it.  Sorry, Lady Columbia.)  The city does have parks, rivers, boats, schools, etc.  It deserves dignity as a regular place to grow up in, that just happens to have the capital.  Tragically, its transient residential status caused the thousands of readers and commenters of our web logs collectively to bypass this aspect of Washington life.

“Retrocession,” or as I call it, “digestion by Maryland,” would degrade this unique character.  I oppose it.  Those who say it would free Washington of certain burdens, such as having to run a DMV, miss the point.  This would strip Washington of its dignity as a special city.  Further, it is impossible.  The point of creating a “non-residential ‘federal quarter’” is to solve the voting problem by putting its population into a jurisdiction that has Congressional votes (Maryland) while leaving the part of the city that belongs to all America under federal control.  The problem is that such a zone, at the minimum, would have to be a triangle containing the Jefferson Memorial, the White House, and the Supreme Court, and there are a lot of people living within that triangle.  Either there would have to be forced evacuations for the purpose of creating a sterile zone, or those people would have to be left out of the plan to give voting rights to all citizens.  Moreover, a sterile non-residential zone goes against principles of good city planning (Jacobs) and further debauches a grand old lady.

It seems unlikely that Washington will ever have the population to support two representatives.  The city is atrophying and has lost about 40% of its population in the last fifty years; at the same time, the number of people supporting a single House seat grows ever higher.  In 2010, the number of people needed for a State to claim two seats will exceed one million — five hundred thousand more than Washington has.  Washington’s House delegation, if awarded proportionally to the other States, would never exceed one.

Senate representation is a great question.  Logically, if the basis for granting a House seat is that people deserve an equal voice in Congress, then there is no reason not to grant a “full” two seats’ Senate representation.  Otherwise, we’ll still have the “second-class status” argument hanging out there.  (It was amusing to see Stroodler willing to bargain down to a single seat.  Washington been down so long, it don’t know what up is.)  But while the great constitutional compromise between the large and small States was to create two bodies, the House for the people and the Senate for the States, it does not justify granting Washington two Senate seats for the simple reason that Washington is not a State.  (And we all agreed to leave at least part of Washington a “local government” rather than a State.)

I also find it interesting that in all this, nobody advanced the legal argument that the “District Clause” of the Constitution, art. I, cl. 17 (go here and search for “District”; also read interesting annotations), which provides that the Congress has broad powers to control affairs relating to the District, gives Congress the power to add a seat without a constitutional amendment.  But I think this is a bad argument; it’s clear that the clause provides the power to control land use, building restrictions, police authority, and those kinds of things; it doesn’t let Congress restructure the Congress by changing its membership.  I think it’s sad that some, including the Utahns colluding with the Democrats to add the seat, want to justify the change on this weak ground, rather than embarking on the lengthy moral crusade of amendment.  By granting D.C. electoral votes, the American people have already demonstrated that if the cause is just, they will amend the Constitution even at the expense of their own interests.  That is the surest route to solving this problem, whatever the solution may be.

Political

The unbearable unnaturalness of being

The organization DC Vote has put up a documentary movie on its web site called “Un-Natural State.”  It’s worth the eight minutes.  (You can also get a teacher’s worksheet because the video apparently complies with Washington ninth grade history and government class standards.)

If you watch this video, you’re going to learn two shocking things.

First, that DC Vote thinks we should rewrite our Constitution so our government can be more like Venezuela’s.

Secondly, that there is a guy who is the United States Senator for the District.  I think it is so cute that Washington has a Senator!  And, he’s a white former New Yorker!

If you do watch it, let me know what you think.  The best part is when 35 seconds in, the narrator asks, “Are things really as they seem?”  It’s quite ominous; the shot of birds flying over the head is pure Hitchcock.

Political

Congressional skullduggery

I’ve been watching the battle over giving Washington, D.C. representation in the United States House of Representatives with some amusement.  If you don’t know about this, and you like political arcana, catch up.

As you might know, D.C. license plates proclaim it’s the land of “Taxation Without Representation.”  (That’s a great automotive statement easily surpassing New York City’s “Don’t Even Think of Parking Here” signs.)  People in Washington think they’re being cheated out of having a Congressman and two Senators, even though they’re free to move to a real State at any time.  They do have a non-voting representative, whose sole job seems to be House jester.

People in Utah also feel cheated out of a House seat, too, and they’ve been feeling that way ever since the 2000 census.  Why?  Because Utah, which has only three representatives, missed the cutoff for a fourth seat by about eight hundred people.  They claimed that the Census failed to count Mormon missionaries who were out of the country at the time; they also took issue with a statistical method the Census uses.  This bothered them enough to take their case to the Supreme Court, where they lost.  (North Carolina has the seat Utah wanted.)  This part of the story seems to be missing from the current coverage, and it explains why the Beehive State’s so into this idea.

Fast forward to today.  Somebody in Washington (or maybe it was Utah — I’m not sure) got the admittedly savvy idea that if we added one seat for D.C., which would probably go Democrat, we could add one seat for Utah, which would probably go Republican, and keep the balance we have.  Everybody wins — Utah’s pacified and Washington’s seat is still as worthless as it is today since it’ll always get canceled out!  What a great compromise.  (Never mind that it is unconstitutional to add seats for D.C. — more on that later.)

I read in the Post, however, that yesterday House Republicans attached an amendment to this bill.  Now, if the bill passes, the amendment repeals D.C.’s very strict gun laws.  This is an even more savvy political move than the original idea, in my view.  If liberal Democrats vote for it, hoping to give D.C. its representation, they repeal its gun control laws.  Some liberals will now vote against the bill because they’d rather keep the gun control.  Realizing this, the Democratic leadership stalled the bill.  Now Republicans can say they refused to support the constitutional right to arms.

All this manuevering puts me in the mind of my law review article (which I certainly hope can be described as “forthcoming” someday).  I wrote on legislative silliness, and one case in point was LBJ’s 1956 manuevering to get senators from the Pacific Northwest to support an amendment that weakened the civil rights bill so that the South would accept the bill.  In exchange for that support, he promised the Northwest his support for a series of federal dams — which actually passed the Senate.  The cunning part of this plan was, Johnson’s dam support was worthless because the House never passed the dam bill.  The President would probably have vetoed it anyway.  It cost nothing to keep his end of the deal, and in exchange, the Northwest gave LBJ his greatest legislative victory.

Republicans have the opportunity to pull the same trick here.  Suppose the combined D.C. voting and gun-rights actually passes.  It will immediately be challenged by some Republican somewhere, and one of two things will happen.  One possibility is the courts will strike down the part of the bill giving D.C. the vote, because D.C.’s not a State and the Constitution gives representation only to States; Utah, however, will probably keep its representative because Congress can change the number of seats at any time.  The other possibility is the whole voting part of the bill will go out the window, leaving the gun control repeal on the books.  Either way, Republicans win.

I can’t believe Democrats are falling into this trap, except that they are giddy with the intoxication of their big November wins.

The most interesting part of this is why it’s such a big deal for Utah right now.  There is another census coming up in three years.  At that point, the whole Congressional deck is reshuffled.  It would be impossible to predict at this time which State will be in Utah’s position — being the very next in line for a seat, if only the House had room for one more.  The thing is, though, there will always be that one State that just didn’t make it.  And because of the way the math works, it’s essentially random (but it is always most likely to be California).  All this work now, just to get a short-term gain that Utah, with its high growth rate, will almost certainly have outright after 2010 anyway, seems a little late.  Where was this idea in 2000?

Law school / Solely personal

Two endings

OK, so I’ve been away for a while… but I have good reasons not for writing! I was preoccupied last month with the ABA’s National Appellate Advocacy Competition, which was a competition my partner and I started dealing with back on December 2nd and ended (for us) last weekend with absolutely fine results on March 4th, last Saturday. As part of the problem, we had to write a brief for the governor and elections commissioner of the fictional state of Calisota, and then in March we went to Washington to argue both sides of this state against other law schools.

I have to say we both hated writing the brief and we put its completion off until the last hours. I printed all the important cases and put them into a 4-inch binder, then lugged them around with me on my New York City trip before Christmas… you know, just in time for the transit strike. I didn’t read many then. Our brief had to be filed in the middle of January, and these awful cases weighed heavily on my mind. They had to be read before the writing could start, but who wants to plod full of hundreds of contradictory pages. (Of course, looking back on it, I like it. This always happens.)

So as I say, last month we went to Washington to compete. If we won all the rounds in D.C., we would have made it to Chicago to compete in April.

Our first round was against two students I dubbed John Edwards and Tape Recorder Girl. John Edwards looked and spoke exactly like the failed vice-presidential candidate (except this one confessed to being from Tennessee). He was impassioned but a little over-eager for my money. Tape Recorder Girl had perfectly scripted responses to judges’ questions, which drove me crazy. They beat us by only 1.777 points out of a possible 100. We were crushed and spent the entire next day moping around and blaming ourselves, wondering why we had gotten into this and considering throwing the rest of the competition. (Everyone was guaranteed to participate in three rounds, but your performance in those rounds qualified you for more.)

So the next day, as I say, we practiced and practiced for the second round, which was not until 6.15pm. I have never beaten myself up so much in my life, and for what? All day, my stomach was flooded with angst and a pervasive sense of foreboding. (Yes, I’m being a drama queen, but that’s how I felt.) Either we would fail again and be further humiliated, or we would succeed, and have to go on further in the competition and be humiliated there. Either way, it was a nice day in D.C. and I’d rather be doing something else!

The second round featured opponents we eventually decided reminded us of characters from Doogie Howser, M.D., particularly Vinnie. This guy could not keep his hands still, but he was so short the judges could not see them gyrating behind the podium. We were confident that we had him beat. Both of us felt very good about our performance. So you can imagine our shock to hear we had lost again, but this time by only 0.444 point out of 100.

At this point, we were ready to drown our sorrows in the comforting embrace of alcohol and fitful sleep. What could be done? We clearly were going home humiliated. Then I learned the other team from Capital lost their second round by 13 points, and the clouds parted a bit. :-)

The preparations for the third round were even more farcical. The rules of the competition provided only 16 slots for the fourth round, and your performance in rounds 1, 2, and 3 qualified you for round 4. Since our record was 0-2, we didn’t think we would qualify for round 4 and would therefore be permitted to escape our suits and ties and go outside to play. Unfortunately… Since we had lost rounds 1 and 2 by the tiniest of margins, we were ranked as the very best 0-2 team. And that meant we had to play the very worst 0-2 team in round 3. As I put it, the best of the worst had to play the worst of the worst (North Carolina State, and they actually were the nicest people at the competition!), which was the team that had lost by a cumulative 32 points. This was going to be a painful round, I thought. People who don’t like arcane math things can skip the rest of this paragraph.  The problem with this whole setup was that if we beat our hapless opponents in round 3, our record would then be 1-2. So if some other 1-1 team lost its third round, it would also be ranked 1-2.  And if our margin of victory was higher than theirs — and it would have to be, since we were going into this thing with a -2.222 score — we were going to leapfrog some other teams, qualify for the fourth round, and we would then face the strongest team at the competition.  And of course, we were to face certain defeat, agony, and have to sit around in our suits for another four hours! Why wouldn’t the ABA just let us go have a nice lunch and forget about all this madness?!

And that’s exactly what happened. Round 3 was a real drubbing for the other side, even though I tried to help them as much as possible by stuttering, flubbing, and even waving my arms and saying (about the avoidance canon of statutory construction), “But that’s what we fought an entire Civil War over!” We won by some 13 points anyway and had to play Southern Methodist University in round 4, a team that was comprised of two judicial cyborgs whose smooth-tongued orations had been programmed by Daniel Webster himself. We lost (but only by four and a half points!) and were finally permitted to go home.

All in all, it was a fun experience, even though I probably spent two hundred hours reading cases, writing stuff, and practicing three times at week at the law school. Moot court is hard work. I wound up wondering why I was doing it, though… unless we were the absolute #1 team in the country, the road to victory was certain to end before I wanted it to. Of course, it’s fabulous experience to read, think, write, and talk, and I did get to sit on the bench of the Federal Circuit during a break, but my God, the strain it can put on a person is a lot to bear. I’m glad to have it over with, at least until the fall when we do it again!