Re: (ReacTor) Five SF Scenarios Involving the US Presidential Line of Succession

Chris Buckley wrote:

On 2024-10-14, William Hyde <wthyde1953@gmail.com> wrote:

Chris Buckley wrote:

On 2024-10-11, William Hyde <wthyde1953@gmail.com> wrote:

Dimensional Traveler wrote:

On 10/10/2024 9:28 AM, William Hyde wrote:

Paul S Person wrote:

I also suspect a new District of Columbia will be established,
probably in the middle of the country. Nothing like high mountains and
a thousand miles or two of land to make a government feel secure.

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Without, one hopes, disenfranchising a million Americans.
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You can't be disenfranchised if you don't have the ability to vote in
the first place.  ;)

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As I understand it a number of people in Georgetown and other
settlements in what became DC were rather unhappy with their loss of
voting rights.
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When I lived in DC someone published a few letters from the time as part
of the movement to enfranchise the residents of DC.

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The issue in DC has not been about being able to vote for a long time.

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It certainly was when I lived there.
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Republicans have been floating plans to enfranchise DC residents for
decades,

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Only plans that will never come to fruition.
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   but the local Democrats have been saying "no, we don't want

to vote that much."  The Republican plans are to join DC and Maryland
in some form, perhaps making the remaining DC part of Maryland

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Maryland doesn't want them.  That's what makes the plan so perfect for
the Republicans. It won't happen but they can say that they are doing
something.

 Baloney!

Reality.
Look it up.  It's not popular in Maryland.

 First, both DC and Maryland are heavily Democratic;

Quite irrelevant.  The voters of Maryland do not want to share their senators with the people of DC.
If we come to the point where Maryland accepts the deal, but DC does not, then there's an end of it as far as I am concerned.  But as the people of DC have been without legislative representation for over 200 years, I don't think they should be required to wait until MD changes it's mind.
There's no reason DC has to be a state.  It's just that making it a state or joining it with MD would not require a constitutional amendment.
But it would be easy to formulate, if not pass, another solution.  The district will have voting house members in proportion to its population (one at the moment and probably forever) and one senator.
Nothing would change in the US except that the people of DC would have some voting power, albeit less than the people of Vermont or Wyoming, both with smaller populations.  But then the senate is inherently undemocratic anyway.  Not nearly as undemocratic as ours, but undemocratic all the same.
William Hyde