Photo by philliefan99

It’s been over 200 years since District residents have been denied the basic democratic rights afforded to other Americans, so we shouldn’t be beyond thinking outside the box when it comes to solutions. Here’s an interesting one floated last week by The Transportationist, a Minnesota-based blog on transit and economics:

Rather than DC being a state of itself (it is smallish, certainly in size, but also in population), which clearly raises the ire of Republicans who would be loathe to create 2 Democratic Senate seats, or being functionally retroceded to Maryland (which gets Maryland one more representative, but diminishes each Marylander’s vote for Senate and creates new demands on taxpayers), we could divide the District into 50 districts, and assign each to one of the fifty states. The districts should be approximately equal in size (~12000) people and area (~1.2 square miles).

The elegance of this is that everyone in Washington would get a federal vote, some people in Minnesota, some in Florida, and so on. Every Senator and 50 representatives would all have some interest in the District of Columbia, as a good number of their constituents live there. Washington would no longer be “there”, but instead be part of all of the United States. Incumbents in Congress should vote for it, since they have an advantage in campaigning in this not inconsequential district of the District compared to rivals.

How would these new state districts be divided? By the state-named avenue they are closest to, of course. So if you lived in Dupont Circle, you’d be either part of Connecticut, Massachusetts or New Hampshire; up where I live north of Columbia Heights, I’d get lumped in with either Kansas or Arkansas. (Yay?)

Of course, we’d be remiss in not pointing out that this won’t work. Many of the original state-named avenues crisscross the city, while those of states that joined the union in later years are short or relegated to the fringes of the city. You’d likely end up with some oddly shaped districts that cross neighborhood and ward boundaries. And since many of the state-named avenue run as diagonals, they invariably run into each other. What would you do with the aforementioned Dupont Circle, which could go for any of the three state-named avenues that intersect at the circle itself? And thinking politically, is it fair to hand part of Ward 8 over to Alabama? Or Chevy Chase to Nebraska?

Probably not, but hey, A+ for creative thinking.