Henry Clay Lives

It was a time of great disunion. The country was plagued by an intractable dispute between two snarling factions over a proposition that threatened to alter the balance of power in Congress by granting one faction additional representation. The other faction, naturally, would have none of it. The only way to keep the peace was to grant it additional representation as well.

One could easily assume that the foregoing description of an era refers to the series of controversies regarding the annexation of free and slave states that prefaced the Civil War. Ominously, however, it also flawlessly encapsulates the more recent fracas over congressional representation in the District of Columbia.

It is unacceptable that our legislative process has been defiled by such pursuit of partisan equilibrium. Issues ought to be decided on their merits, not their political repercussions. Sure, a degree of politicization has always been present on Capitol Hill, but this brand of congressional balance-of-power politics was conspicuously absent from the postbellum annexation of Western states, including Hawaii and Alaska. What does it say of the state of our nation that the issue of D.C. voting rights has exposed a political schism reminiscent of antebellum America?

Since 1980, when it unsuccessfully attempted to become the state of New Columbia by convening its own constitutional convention, D.C. has persistently and vainly sought equal representation in Congress. Proponents cite the undemocratic nature of the present arrangement; opponents cite the unconstitutionality of the proposed measure. The effort has been rebuffed every time.

On Feb. 26, however, the Senate at long last passed the D.C. Voting Rights Act, granting the District’s heretofore symbolic congressperson a vote. With the House of Representatives and the White House likely to approve of the act, its passage is virtually guaranteed.

In order to secure its passage, however, Democratic proponents of the bill had to make two concessions: the repeal of the majority of D.C.’s gun-control regulations and, more significantly, an additional congressional seat for the state of Utah, a stipulation first offered in the failed D.C. House Voting Rights Act of 2007.

The significance of this latter provision is that Utah is one of the most heavily Republican states in the Union, while D.C. is among the most Democratic sectors of the country due to its disproportionately high African-American population. In order for the bill to pass, the entailed increase in Democratic congressional representation had to be balanced by an equivalent increase in Republican congressional representation.

This Faustian bargain bears frightening parallels to the superfluous addition of Maine to the Union as a free state prompted by the addition of Missouri as a slave state in the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Although it is unlikely that our current factional strife will plunge us into the bloody maelstrom that put to rest the question of free states versus slave states, it speaks ill of our democracy that we are now seeing our two parties resorting to the peacekeeping shenanigans employed by their Democratic and Whig forebearers.



Dhruv K. Singhal ’12, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Straus Hall.