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July 07, 2003
Maybe I'll Move to Wyoming
If Washington, D.C., gets representation in the house, it may turn out that the D.C. vote in Congress is courtesy of the Mormons:
Does the District of Columbia's Road to Representation lead to Salt Lake City? That's one way to interpret Virginia Rep. Tom Davis's tantalizing proposal to give the nation's capital a full-fledged seat in the House of Representatives. It almost sounds to good to be true: a ranking Republican offering a congressional vote to doggedly Democratic D.C. The Democrats must be salivating at the prospect.More info on D.C. rights at letsfreedc.org, including juicy facts like if the District were to become the 51st state, it would be the 50th largest (D.C. population exceeds that of Wyoming by about 80,000 . . . and Vermont's only about 25,000 people ahead of us).Ah, but this largess comes with a catch: Davis's proposal entails expanding the size of the House not by one, but by two. Utah, which narrowly missed receiving an extra seat in the 2000 reapportionment, stands next in line. (Another 857 residents, or being able to include overseas Mormon missionaries, would have clinched it.) While there are many good reasons to grant statehood to the District, not the least of which is the "fair and just" right to a vote in Congress, as Davis puts it, I'll bet few of the city's advocates have ever linked its fate to that of rugged, reliably Republican Utah.
Posted July 7, 2003 06:44 AM