Posted on 03/26/2019 7:36:55 AM PDT by C19fan
Democrats are in charge of the House of Representatives once again, and so they have placed a bill on the House floor that would admit the District of Columbia to the Union as a state. The political motivations are clear. The new state for which they propose the unwieldy name State of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth would be reliably Democratic, adding two senators and one representative to the partys totals.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
How many Puerto Ricans in New York jails? Deport them before independence. Veterans get citizenship as long as there’s no rap sheet on them.
William F. Buckley, Jr. “retired” from the CIA and founded National Review.
It was all downhill from there...
National Review was always the right wing of the Mockingbird.
http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php
NO freaken way..
Culture is NOT ours.
Island is an economic basket case.
Trillions to bring it up to basic American level.
Edumacation level poor.
Graft and corruption that would make New jersey or Delaware look clean.
Infrastructure? horrible.
But hey, every last one of these folks will vote dem as they love to be on the take.
You would not want to attach the heavily Black & Democrat USVI to Florida. It would’ve been enough to tip it to the Dems last November. It would be better off granting them independence and letting them merge with the British V.I. to form a larger government entity.
Rectal defilade I calls it...
William F Buckley wouldn’t recognize the mewling mess NR has become. And, correct me if I’m remembering wrong, VDH was virulently anti-Trump in the beginning.
When PR kicked out the US Navy, they voted themselves into irrelevance.
I don’t know if you are assuming statehood for DC or for PR. DC sends about 4 times the tax money to the feds than it receives back from the feds. I know that would NOT be the case for PR as a state. DC also has sufficient local income tax rates to cover its budget, which Congress has to sign off on. Anything passed by the DC Council has to wait for 30 days to see if Congress wants to make further changes. I have heard that in PR many lower income people are worried about the federal income tax if PR became a state. From what I have heard about PR incomes, the federal tax would not be collected from many PR residents given their low family income.
But like VDH I warmed up to him after the primaries. If I'd had known how long he'd stick to his anti-media persona and how powerful it'd be I would have voted for him the primary.
Another possibility for DC would be to give it back the chunk in Virginia that was taken away over 150 years ago. This happened when DC was ending it’s slave market, and the dear fellows in Arlington (now Virginia) wanted to keep their slave market so they organized a vote to get their south-of-the-Potomac chunk out of the Capital. DC really should get that chunk back. This would substantially increase a DC population that is already more than Wyoming and Vermont making 2 senators seem more reasonable. Also, since Virginia is becoming a Democrat state, it would put a lot of the Democrats with DC and give the Republicans in the rest of the state a chance to reassert their power. So this solution could be of interest to both parties.
In the last election of Governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands, the independent beat the Democrat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_United_States_Virgin_Islands_gubernatorial_election
It is a mistake to make generalizations based on pigmentation. Afro-Caribbeans have different cultures from the African American culture. The Democrats, with their welfare programs, have been committing a slow genocide against African Americans since the 1960s. Afro-Caribbeans immigrants have moved ahead of native-born blacks in income and wealth. They have stronger families and stronger savings and work ethics. Not surprisingly,
“Black Caribbean immigrants are more likely to identify with more conservative ideologies”
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0034644618770762
This is all very surprising to most Americans, but not at all surprising to followers of Thomas Sowell. For decades, he has dug deep into the numbers, to illustrate that culture, not race, determines economic outcomes.
I’m familiar with USVI politics.
That election you referenced was the 2014 election. The Democrat beat the incumbent Governor, Ken Mapp, of the Independent Citizens Movement party in November 2018. The Republican Party doesn’t really exist in the USVI anymore. Its standard-bearer was Gov. Melvin Evans back in the 1970s, and he managed to parlay it into winning a single term in Congress (Delegate) in 1978 (the first Black Republican to win a House seat since Oscar DePriest won his last term in 1932 from Chicago), but he promptly lost in the Reagan landslide of 1980.
The ICM Party is the alternative to the USVI Democrats, the catch-all for closeted USVI Republicans, but it is really little more than a protest party, winning an occasional race for Governor only to be dumped at the next election. Other than for Mel Evans, an ICM member won in 1994 (and he promptly caucused with the minority Democrats) and was promptly defeated in 1996 by a regular Democrat.
The last open Republican to run for U.S. Delegate was in 2014, and he got 8% of the vote. The last open Republican to run for Governor (excluding Kenneth Mapp, as he last ran as a Republican in 1996) was in 2002, and they got all of 7%.
As I said, to attach such a political locale to Florida would’ve potentially provided Dems with enough votes in a close election for them to win: To wit, Rick Scott beat Ben Nelson by 10,000 votes. The USVI would more than likely have provided 20,000+ votes to Nelson, and reelected him.
Yeah DJ is right. Puerto Rico is one thing, millions of people there, and while I’m skeptical at the moment (Dems pushing for it make clear they are confident of winning there if it was a state.) there is the possibly of competitive elections, that’s a discussion.
But tiny heavily RAT USVI? That’s a hard no. Attaching it to FLORIDA, which we’ve been winning by a hair? That’s BONKERS. Would you attach a tumor to the lungs of one of your loved ones?
Putting DC in Maryland would kill any small chance MD GOP would win anything, Governor Hogan’s relative landslide may have well been a loss. Hard pass. Is that “fair” to DC voters? No, it’s not. I’m surprised the rats haven’t been able to make more hay out of that issue of “disenfranchised Black voters”. But I don’t care, you don’t hand your enemy more ammunition. DC peeps are SOL, they shouldn’t have electoral votes as far as I’m concerned. Do you think if DC was nothing but working class Whites that the democrats would ever allow it to either be a state or become part of Maryland? LOL.
The only solution for DC I could support is a new state from DC plus adjacent (rat) areas in MD and VA, which would make MD a swing state and return VA to the GOP. Obviously I don’t expect this to happen but this is the only way to let DCers vote for Congress without screwing ourselves.
There have been proposals for an amendment to give DC one seat in the House but no Senate. I could live with that if it happened but still couldn’t support adding a permanent democrat seat.
Guam and NMI (and poor American Samoa, never given citizenship for some reason) might actually improve our chances if they were added to Hawaii.
2018 run-off election for Gov. of U.S. Virgin Islands:
Independent (known to be a Republican) 45%, Democrat 55%
2,000 vote difference. Not 20,000.
Indeed, the total vote was barely over 20,000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_Virgin_Islands_gubernatorial_election
Overwhelmingly black. But not overwhelmingly Democrat.
Afro-Caribbeans don’t share the welfare/single-parent/gangster culture of African Americans. I could say the same thing about recent immigrants from Africa. It’s one thing for African American “scholars” to pooh-pooh Sowell’s differentiation among subgroups of blacks in the U.S. But, Sowell’s path-breaking has now been replicated by many and is now undeniable.
Democrat policies are designed, even intended to destroy the black family and the black neighborhood, in order to turn blacks into a permanent underclass. Those policies are slow genocide. Blacks outside the U.S., not caught in the welfare trap, range along the political spectrum. They’re not overwhelmingly Democrat.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0049089X08001130
As I outlined in my previous post, USVI residents WILL NOT vote Republican openly by more than 8%. Mapp ran as a member of the ICM Party because he couldn’t win as a Republican, period. I said that 20,000 USVI voters if given the option of voting Dem or GOP would vote Dem by over 90%. That would mean if you attached it to FL, Ben Nelson would still be Senator now.
I’m not sure what your point is attaching links regarding Afro-Caribbean culture and how the Dems are harming Blacks (of course they are !), it still doesn’t change their actual voting habits, which in the USVI, just like nearly all their mainland Black counterparts, still vote against the GOP by a margin of 9-to-1.
The Republicans don’t have a single elected official in the USVI. The legislature, 15 members, is 13 Democrats and 2 Independents. That is ZERO percent GOP Representation.
In my proposal, DC would vote in federal elections as part of Maryland, but not in state elections. DC would elect its own municipal government. The same principle could apply to each of the incorporated territories.
I would prefer the pairings be mutually agreed-to and then ratified by Congress. While Maryland is the obvious partner for DC, there is no obvious partner for the off-shore incorporated territories. I merely suggested, e.g., Guam with Hawaii for concreteness.
I realize each party will look at the immediate tactical advantages. The Democrats would probably figure they’d net one voting Congressman and lose two electoral votes with the set up for DC; and, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the Northern Marianas Islands are simply too small to have any affect.
But, in my view, parties in the U.S. system are continually adjusting so as to be competitive. In the long run, there’s no telling what the effect would be, other than enabling every American to vote in federal elections.
Since you brought up American Samoa, perhaps a proposal like this would nudge them and us to consider incorporating the territory into the U.S.
One word...NO!!
Not surprisingly, Jeb Bush supported Puerto Rican statehood during his Presidential run. That must by the type of "conservative" NR has in mind.
The best thing for both Puerto Rico and the US isn't statehood, but independent nation status - true sovereign nation status, as opposed to the phony sovereign status of Indian tribes where they get the benefits of sovereignty but still rely on the US government to support them.
We keep our military bases in PR as part of the bargain, but won't be responsible for bailing out their tanking economy and infrastructure, and Puerto Ricans who want to come to the US will have to apply as visitors or immigrants from any other country do.
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