The Politics and Double Standards in the Statehood debate

There was a little kerfuffle on the Interwebs this week about whether DC and Puerto Rico would be added as states and whether that was a good thing.

I don’t know that I’d say “heavily.” The GOP does okay in the territories. I’ve argued that a Full Representation package deal for DC and the five territories (provided the islands all want it) would be principled and sellable across the aisle. (politico.com/interactives/2…) (Though now seeing Ryan added modifer “West” to his tweet — that’s more granular than the rest of this post.)

The governor of Puerto Rico is a Republican who is administering a statehood referendum this November. (thehill.com/latino/516976-…) Indeed, Republican-affiliated governors have ruled the island for the majority of the last 11 years.

The non-voting reps from American Samoa and Puerto Rico currently are GOP-affiliated.

Guam has been governed by Republicans for most of this century.

The Northern Mariana Islands have been governed by Republicans for most of the Commonwealth period.

Even the Virgin Islands had a Republican as their first elected governor.

Heck, even DC has had two Republicans in its at-large seats (tho these are reserved by law for non-Dems).

So, there’s a reason progressives are excited about adding states. But I don’t think it hurts to make the case that politics in the territories would actually be competitive.

Some make the argument that the territories are too small to be states, e.g.

Puerto Rico, DC, Guam, and the Virgin Islands all surpass the 60,000 person threshold that historically governed applications for statehood.

And American Samoa and the Northern Marianas exceed the lowest population that Congress actually admitted as a state: Nevada. They come close to Illinois and Oregon’s population at statehood. (rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/f…)

The US Virgin Islands have a bigger population than 16 states at admission: NV, OR, IL, DE, WY, MO, RI, KY, MS, GA, ID, VT, FL, CA (!), AR, and TN. Guam has a bigger population than 23 states at admission: the above, plus KS, NE, MT, NH, AL, IN, and LA.

DC’s 705,749 population is larger than all but two states at accession. Oklahoma had 1,657,144 people in its admission in 1907 — a process that didn’t exactly go smoothly. That was 2.2 times as many as runner-up Virginia, which had 747,550 people in 1776. (npr.org/2020/07/09/889…)

There is no precedent for a territory the population of Puerto Rico’s 3.1 million being denied statehood — one reason why the island’s status is getting so much attention. (abcnews.go.com/Politics/donal…) That’s nearly twice the population of the most populous state (OK) upon admission. It’s 17.4 times the population of the median state upon accession. And it’s 110.7 times the population of the least populous state upon accession.

In response to this thread, some said that the population for a suitable accession should be effectively “inflation-adjusted”:

Unclear why one would adjust for the size of the population at some point other than accession. The whole point of the 60k rule of thumb is to ensure that more than a trivial number of people are living there and can stand up a government. The standard was never “a territory must have a certain number of people relative to the other states at the former’s time of accession.” Unclear what an acceptable ratio would be and many current states would likely not meet it. I do not understand the normative or empirical rationale for this comparison. The relevant concerns are: 1) Ensuring full representation for all. 2) Economic and administrative feasibility of standing up a local government and economy.

The best argument for population weighting for accession is that admitting less populous states would further dilute the power of whiter and richer states in the US Senate.

That, it should be noted, has a serious racial and economic equity downside. Most other countries don’t have senates that are this counter-majoritarian. The beef is with the Senate, not accessions of totally unrepresented people. I appreciate this perspective, and we grapple with it in our report. Many of the proposals for fixing Senate countermajoritarianism would require a constitutional convention. One clear advantage of adding states is that Congress can do so by majority vote. So if we’re not going to get a merger of the overrepresented white Wyoming and the Dakotas, racial and economic equity call for giving representation to territories that are majority POC. (And, FWIW, Guam rejected union with NMI in a 1969 referendum.)

That said, there has been a long history of efforts at closer union. Even with a merger of Guam and NMI, however, you’d be looking at a state of only about 220,000. That would, however, still be larger than 31 states at accession. (guampedia.com/history-of-eff…) And even if a Guam/NMI merger occurred, that still leaves unresolved the status of American Samoa — which has perhaps the most distinctive status within the Union of all the territories. (nbcnews.com/news/asian-ame…)

(Adapted from this thread.)