An Open Letter to President Obama by A. Loikow
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Andrea Rosen
Oct 10, 2013, 10:41:16 PM10/10/13
to occupythevotedcs-...@googlegroups.com
An Open Letter to President Obama
A. Loikow, alo...@verizon.net
Published in The Mail, Oct. 9, 2013
I am one of your neighbors who supported your election with my vote and donations, yet whom you have consistently and callously ignored. I am your subject and a resident of the District of Columbia, and, now, thanks to your silence on an issue of critical importance to the health, welfare, and liberty of your neighbors in the District, I am likely to experience the shutdown of my state-level, local, and municipal services. I know this is a situation you would strongly oppose happening to the State of Illinois or the City of Chicago, but whose consequences you ignore in the District of Columbia.
This is all happening because we are denied the right to govern ourselves and spend our own state-level and local tax monies. The reason: the District of Columbia is a colony, whose budget is treated as if it were a federal agency, even though the funds involved are locally raised tax receipts. There is one simple solution that is just, democratic, and completely constitutional — statehood. The sole reason we are caught up in your and Congress’s debate over the federal budget and federal laws because the District of Columbia is not a state. Even though the people who lived in what is now the District of Columbia fought in the American Revolution, helped create this country and had the full rights of American citizenship until 1801 (to the extent that citizens of the states had them), for over two centuries District residents have been protesting the revocation of their rights and Congress’s and Presidents’ lack of effort to restore them.
A number of Presidents, beginning with President John Adams, and many members of Congress, have spoken out against denying the citizens of our national capital the same right to govern themselves that other Americans enjoy. They have recognized that District residents bear all the burdens of American citizenship but few of the benefits. Our status is virtually identical to that of the American colonists in 1774, except that Congress is our Parliament and you are our king. You should find this situation wrong, undemocratic, and abhorrent if you believe in Thomas Jefferson’s stirring words in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence that "all Men are created equal, . . . endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable Rights, . . . That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed. . . ."
As President William Henry Harrison notes in his inaugural address in 1841: "It is in this District only where American citizens are to be found who under a settled policy are deprived of many important political privileges without any inspiring hope as to the future. . . . Are their rights alone not to be guaranteed by the application of those great principles upon which all our constitutions are founded? We are told by the greatest of British orators and statesmen that at the commencement of the War of the Revolution the most stupid men in England spoke of ‘their American subjects.’ Are there, indeed, citizens of any of our States who have dreamed of their subjects in the District of Columbia? Such dreams can never be realized by any agency of mine. The people of the District of Columbia are not the subjects of the people of the States, but free American citizens. Being in the latter condition when the Constitution was formed, no words used in that instrument could have been intended to deprive them of that character. If there is anything in the great principle of unalienable rights so emphatically insisted upon in our Declaration of Independence, they could neither make nor the United States accept a surrender of their liberties and become the subjects of their former fellow-citizens. . . ."
Please speak out for the rights of your neighbors in the District of Columbia and demand that Congress rectify this 213-year-old wrong by approving H.R. 292 and S. 132, the New Columbia Admission Act, and admit the residential and commercial sections of the current District of Columbia as the 51st state. Only then will residents of what is now the District of Columbia permanently have the same right to self-government as other Americans, including the right to determine their own state and local budgets and how they will spend their own state and local tax monies. Statehood would remove the blot on American democracy that numerous international bodies, including the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the United Nations Human Rights Committee, have found to be a violation of the United States’ human rights commitments under international law. President Obama, please actively and emphatically support admission of the State of New Columbia that would free our state and local budget from entanglement with the Federal budget and this and future Federal budget disputes.
Posted by Andrea Rosen
A. Loikow, alo...@verizon.net
Published in The Mail, Oct. 9, 2013
I am one of your neighbors who supported your election with my vote and donations, yet whom you have consistently and callously ignored. I am your subject and a resident of the District of Columbia, and, now, thanks to your silence on an issue of critical importance to the health, welfare, and liberty of your neighbors in the District, I am likely to experience the shutdown of my state-level, local, and municipal services. I know this is a situation you would strongly oppose happening to the State of Illinois or the City of Chicago, but whose consequences you ignore in the District of Columbia.
This is all happening because we are denied the right to govern ourselves and spend our own state-level and local tax monies. The reason: the District of Columbia is a colony, whose budget is treated as if it were a federal agency, even though the funds involved are locally raised tax receipts. There is one simple solution that is just, democratic, and completely constitutional — statehood. The sole reason we are caught up in your and Congress’s debate over the federal budget and federal laws because the District of Columbia is not a state. Even though the people who lived in what is now the District of Columbia fought in the American Revolution, helped create this country and had the full rights of American citizenship until 1801 (to the extent that citizens of the states had them), for over two centuries District residents have been protesting the revocation of their rights and Congress’s and Presidents’ lack of effort to restore them.
A number of Presidents, beginning with President John Adams, and many members of Congress, have spoken out against denying the citizens of our national capital the same right to govern themselves that other Americans enjoy. They have recognized that District residents bear all the burdens of American citizenship but few of the benefits. Our status is virtually identical to that of the American colonists in 1774, except that Congress is our Parliament and you are our king. You should find this situation wrong, undemocratic, and abhorrent if you believe in Thomas Jefferson’s stirring words in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence that "all Men are created equal, . . . endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable Rights, . . . That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed. . . ."
As President William Henry Harrison notes in his inaugural address in 1841: "It is in this District only where American citizens are to be found who under a settled policy are deprived of many important political privileges without any inspiring hope as to the future. . . . Are their rights alone not to be guaranteed by the application of those great principles upon which all our constitutions are founded? We are told by the greatest of British orators and statesmen that at the commencement of the War of the Revolution the most stupid men in England spoke of ‘their American subjects.’ Are there, indeed, citizens of any of our States who have dreamed of their subjects in the District of Columbia? Such dreams can never be realized by any agency of mine. The people of the District of Columbia are not the subjects of the people of the States, but free American citizens. Being in the latter condition when the Constitution was formed, no words used in that instrument could have been intended to deprive them of that character. If there is anything in the great principle of unalienable rights so emphatically insisted upon in our Declaration of Independence, they could neither make nor the United States accept a surrender of their liberties and become the subjects of their former fellow-citizens. . . ."
Please speak out for the rights of your neighbors in the District of Columbia and demand that Congress rectify this 213-year-old wrong by approving H.R. 292 and S. 132, the New Columbia Admission Act, and admit the residential and commercial sections of the current District of Columbia as the 51st state. Only then will residents of what is now the District of Columbia permanently have the same right to self-government as other Americans, including the right to determine their own state and local budgets and how they will spend their own state and local tax monies. Statehood would remove the blot on American democracy that numerous international bodies, including the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the United Nations Human Rights Committee, have found to be a violation of the United States’ human rights commitments under international law. President Obama, please actively and emphatically support admission of the State of New Columbia that would free our state and local budget from entanglement with the Federal budget and this and future Federal budget disputes.
Posted by Andrea Rosen
E P
Oct 11, 2013, 11:23:58 AM10/11/13
to occupythevotedcs-...@googlegroups.com
This is an excellent letter. Maybe more direct appeals are what we need.
Elaine
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