Wednesday, March 25, 1998

No to D.C. statehood

The House vote to allow Puerto Rico to vote on statehood has given new life to a bad idea: statehood for Washington, D.C.

Says the chairman of Washington's pro-statehood Umoja Party: "Puerto Rico is deserving, so is the District of Columbia." No it isn't.

Liberal Democrats once salivated at the thought of the state of New Columbia, with its two U.S. senators, one of them Jesse Jackson. The proposed state constitution promised a cornucopia of government services, including the right of every resident to a state-supported job or income, the money to come from Uncle Sam and a tax on commuters from the Maryland and Virginia suburbs.

D.C. statehood was approved by a House committee in 1987 and endorsed by the Democratic Party and its presidential nominee, Bill Clinton, in 1992. The next year Democrats brought statehood to a vote in the House where it lost, 277-163. That was to be its high tide.

The capital's elected government, headed by a mayor fresh from a stint in jail, became so corrupt, inept and costly that Congress, in return for a federal bailout, took most of its powers and handed them over to appointed receivers.

Statehood still has a small band of advocates, but most of the district's declining number of residents would settle for competently delivered municipal services: schools, garbage removal, police protection, drivers license renewals. And it doesn't take a governor, two U.S. senators and a House member to do that.