Thread by @MattGlassman312

Hear me out on this one: what if Congress—the “master”—decides it wants to provide for a city council, or, heck, make DC a sovereign entity.

If we are so sure the capital city should be ruled by Congress, why the beef when Congress decides how to administratively rule the city?

It’s should be the be most natural thing in the world for people who believe Congress has unilateral authority over DC to accept that Congress might want to shrink DC and spin-off a sovereign state, or provide for a less-than-sovereign measure of self-government.

It might be preferable to have Congress appoint a governor and city council, or for Congress to directly administer DC with Speaker as mayor. Or any number of other arrangements.

But that’s *not* what Congress chose. They chose democratic home rule. Now maybe statehood.

Part of the problem is that a lot of anti-statehood people have talked themselves into a position in which Congress *doesn’t* have unilateral authority over DC, that it’s not an Article 4 territory (which Congress plainly had unilateral authority over) but something different.

Congress can plainly alter the seat of government, and can plainly rule Article 4 territories, so the argument has to be that shrinking DC creates a residual that is not an Article 4 territory.

But that’s nuts, unless you believe the western cessions of the 1780s from the states weren’t article 4 territories.

And so we have this weird dynamic where people demand unilateral congressional rule of DC, but only as it fits a really weird and constrained understanding of how far that rule goes.

And, yes, you can, I guess, plausible argue Congress needs to shrink DC and then get Maryland’s consent to create Douglass. That won’t be a problem.

So then what? The next argument is DC is created in perpetuity. And that’s just nonsense. It’s already been adjusted.