that sounds suspiciously like the “love it or leave it” argument, leaving no room for those who love it but want to change it. the native dc statehood movement should be reason enough to not infer a preference on the part of dc residents for their home to remain a non-state.

I know– which is why I think that repatriation is better than the status quo. That the DC residents don’t want it is kind of relevant, but cuts in more than one direction– if we’re to infer a deliberate consensual decision not to live in Maryland from their decision to live in DC, then why should we also not infer a deliberate consensual decision to live in a non-state?

Still seems to me that DC’s anomalous separateness is an artefact of its separate purpose and non-statehood, and that if it has lost the separate purpose and wants statehood, then its anomalous separateness isn’t entitled to any particular presumption of immutability.

[and re the rest: mea culpa.]

this argument would carry more weight if the resident population of DC actually were the federal government. as it is, a) most federal government employees who work in DC are not domiciled there; and b) those who are make up a small fraction of the DC population.

i think you’d find stiff resistance against repatriating DC to MD at this point – DC citizens who want to be MD citizens already move to PG county sua sponte. (yes, this is a deliberate gross generalization and snide comment about PG.)

When you’re not spending your own money _or_ blood, it’s much easier to find reasons to go to war. [todd]

ahh, that must explain why so many of my libertarian friends were so gung-ho about sending my military friends & family off to the quagmire of iraq.

If Obama turned out to be a covert radical after all, and his radicalism took the form of dismantling the military-industrial complex, I could live with that. Instead, more likely, the Bush-era military/security apparatus will remain, and a stepped-up assault on the domestic front will begin.

One question all this should raise is why exactly we all believe that civilian control of the military is preferable to the alternative. To the extent we want to avoid hastily going to war, those who are the most risk of dying in one would seem to be, rationally, the least likely to vote in favor of fighting.

I can’t see any justification for leaving DC intact and making it a state, and the Founders’ reason for not doing so (in effect, letting the central government count twice, once as the overarching decisionmaker and once by giving it two votes in the Senate and one in the House) still seems sound enough to me. The reasons for statehood are also just as good reasons for complete repatriation; DC’s separate existence was premised on it *not* being a state, and the two should rise or fall together.

I would be willing to take DC’s status up an even greater notch, though, making it a separate, sovereign country — one with authority _only_ over its own geographic area. That would solve many, many problems.