Every one of our 50 states has two Senators and one to 43 Representatives in the U.S. Congress. Now comes Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) promoting a constitutional amendment to enlarge the Congress by adding two Senators and one or two Representatives who would represent Federal employees “as though they were a state.”
It’s not enough that Federal employees already spend our tax dollars in the executive branch of the government to draft legislation, lobby it through Congress, and propagandize the public to accept it. It’s not enough that the Federal Government already spends more than such private-enterprise advertisers as AT&T to sell the public on plans to give away more of our money and control more of our lives.
Senator Kennedy wants Federal employees to have their own special votes in the Senate and the House to make it easier to pass their big-spending bills in the legislative branch.
Of course, Senator Kennedy doesn’t call his proposed constitutional amendment a plan to give privileged treatment to Federal payrollers. With customary Kennedy public relations skill, he has packaged it in the typical trappings of ultra-liberal bleeding-heart rhetoric.
Wrapped in the two bogus issues of District “taxation without representation” and of race, the proposed constitutional amendment was ballyhooed through the House by a vote of 289 to 127. The Senate has begun hearings and a newspaper poll indicates that half of the Senate is undecided on this issue.
It is not true that District residents are the victims of taxation without representation. They have their full share (some would say more than their fair share) of the vote for President and Vice President by virtue of the 23rd Amendment to the Constitution.
The District receives an unrestricted annual grant from the Federal Government that amounts to 38 percent of its budget. Federal aid to the District amounts to more than $1,000 per capita per year. No state with voting representation in the Congress receives anything like that level of handouts.
District residents do not have voting representation in Congress for two reasons. First, the United States is a sovereign nation of many sovereign states, and the District is not a state in any definition of that word. Second, the Founding Fathers had the great wisdom, in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, to exempt the seat of our government from the political process so that the Federal Government might remain the servant of the people and not become its master.
Supporters of the Kennedy Amendment are making a crudely racist appeal by calling attention to the high percentage of blacks who live in the District. The Washington Post reports that “part of the strategy of supporters is to put pressure on Senators who have large numbers of blacks in their states.”
The race issue is as phony as a $3 bill. The constitutional decision to locate the seat of our government in a District geographically separate from any state was made at a time when few blacks lived in the area and their right to vote was not even an issue.
The Federal Government employs more than 38 percent of those working in the District of Columbia, and related service industries employ another 25 percent. Employment trends show an ever-increasing domination by the Federal Government, and there are no significant competing interests.
The real issue involved in Kennedy’s proposed amendment is the giving of special privileges and power to Washington bureaucrats. They are the overwhelmingly dominant class in the District and would surely elect Senators and Representatives who would vote for the interests of their constituents, namely, higher taxes for continued expansion of the Federal bureaucracy and its payroll.
