OPINION

COLUMNIST: Washington D.C. cannot be a state

"DC should be a state. Pass it on." That's the message supporters of D.C. statehood pushed on social media late last week as the U.S. House of Representatives prepared to vote on D.C. statehood.

And on June 26, for the first time in our nation's history, the majority-Democrat U.S. House of Representatives passed along party lines (save for a lone defection) a bill that would create the Douglass Commonwealth (D.C.) as our nation's 51st state.

Fortunately, this vote was nothing more than political theater. The measure is dead on arrival in the U.S. Senate, and if it wasn't, President Donald Trump has committed to opposing it too.

But here's the troubling aspect about this vote: It pushes forward the idea that the bulk of the District of Columbia--a federal enclave functioning as the seat of the federal government--can be converted into the Douglas Commonwealth, a co-equal sovereign state, by mere legislation.

It can't, at least not constitutionally, a fact agreed on by all Justice Departments, Republican or Democrat, until President Barack Obama's attorney general Eric Holder overruled his own Office of Legal Counsel because it had come to the same conclusion.

But it's not the first time that statehood proponents have taken this tack (though it is the furthest they've ever gotten), so the myriad constitutional problems with this approach have previously been catalogued.

Want an authoritative source? How about James Madison, the Father of the Constitution?

In Federalist No. 43 he said, "The indispensable necessity of complete authority at the seat of government, carries its own evidence with it. It is a power exercised by every legislature of the Union, I might say of the world, by virtue of its general supremacy. Without it, not only the public authority might be insulted and its proceedings interrupted with impunity; but a dependence of the members of the general government on the State comprehending the seat of the government, for protection in the exercise of their duty, 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 Confederacy."

But more to the point, as Cato's Roger Pilon said when testifying before the Senate several years ago, "(W)hy are we debating a bill with so little prospect of succeeding and with problems galore if it did? The Framers knew what they were doing when they provided for the seat of government that we have. It has served us well for over two centuries. There are more pressing issues before this chamber."

That much certainly remains true today.

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Zack Smith is a legal fellow in the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation.

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