As the Wall Street Journal reports this morning, it looks increasingly likely that the District of Columbia will finally get full voting rights in the House of Representatives--the votes are there, and House and Senate bills are wending their way through committees. The bills wouldn't give D.C. a senator, as some voting-rights advocates want, and they wouldn't make D.C. a state, just a congressional district.
Nevertheless, critics persist, pushing an increasingly desperate line about a raft of new representative posts for the likes of American Samoa: "It would seem reasonable that if they uphold this statute," an attorney at the Library of Congress told the Journal, "it would also provide senators to D.C. and might well provide precedent for representatives for U.S. territories like Puerto Rico or Guam."
Color me ignorant, but is this a bad thing? Or do we really want to maintain our oh-so-proud legacy as a colonial power?
--Clay Risen