Puerto Rico Features in New Statehood Strategy

Up from the ashes of the D.C. statehood movement has risen a fresh idea: to present D.C. and Puerto Rico as a pair of vote-neutering twins, where the territory’s right-leaning representatives in Congress would cancel out the District’s left-leaning ones. Never mind that Puerto Rico, home to about 3.5 million vote-starved brethren, who are more or less evenly split along party lines, has five times more people than the District. Our dispatch from the latest, and somewhat pointless, statehood commission meeting.

Puerto Rico Features in New Statehood Strategy

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bush defends eavesdropping amid calls for testimony

President George W. Bush defended domestic eavesdropping by the National Security Agency on Sunday after a newspaper report about a Justice Department official's resistance to the program prompted new calls for a Senate inquiry. The New York Times reported on Sunday that James Comey, a deputy to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, was concerned about the legality of the NSA program and refused to extend it in 2004. White House aides then turned to Ashcroft while the attorney general was hospitalized for gallbladder surgery, the Times said. "This is a limited program designed to prevent attacks on the United States of America," Bush said after visiting wounded troops at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. The NSA program "listens to a few numbers called from the outside of the United States and of known al Qaeda or affiliate people," he said. "If somebody from al Qaeda is calling you, we'd like to know why," Bush said. White House spokes...
Read more

Puerto Rico’s Tennessee Plan

Image
Introduction On July 10th, the Governor of Puerto Rico, Ricardo Rosselló announced three new appointments to the newly formed Democracy Commission. Those three appointees join four others who were appointed earlier this year. The commission is tasked with lobbying Congress to approve Puerto Rico’s request for statehood. Puerto Rico’s latest push for statehood resembles the strategy Tennessee used in 1795 to become a state, known as the Tennessee Plan. But what exactly is the Tennessee Plan and how could it help Puerto Rico achieve statehood? What is the Tennessee Plan? The Tennessee Plan refers to the strategy that Tennessee used in 1795 to gain membership into the Union. The territory of Tennessee, then known as the Southwest Territory, was under the jurisdiction of North Carolina from 1777-1788. In 1789, North Carolina ratified the United States Constitution and ceded its Tennessee territory to the federal government. The territory was governed under the Northwest Ordinance, whic...
Read more

Puerto Rico statehood bid a total success

Image
In the midst of an unprecedented economic and fiscal crisis, Puerto Rico held its fifth status referendum in 50 years last Sunday. Producing a 97 percent victory in favor of statehood, New Progressive Party (PNP) Gov. Ricardo Rosselló has made it clear that he will lose no time leveraging the mandate to push Congress to admit Puerto Rico as the 51st state. Despite this, Rosselló will surely exclude from his sales pitch any reference to the successful electoral boycott organized and supported by practically every movement, party, and sector other than the PNP. Though Puerto Rican voters traditionally churn out en masse for electoral events, only about a quarter of voters participated in Rosselló's referendum. Turnout rates for previous votes on the matter in 2012, 1998, 1993 and 1967 boasted participation rates of 78 percent, 71 percent, 74 percent, and 60 percent, respectively. The boycott, in effect, was thus successful. Though turnout tends to be low in the U.S., such organize...
Read more