2416 "I" Street, NW
Washington, DC 20037
March 4, 1990
The Honorable Patrick Moynihan
United States Senator
Senate Office Building
Washington, D.c.
Dear Senator Moynihan:
The issue of D.C. statehood is again becoming current. Jesse Jackson has announced he will not run for Mayor, but would accept the job of "Shadow" Senator, from which position he proposes to work full time for D.C. statehood.
I hope and believe that the Congress will not permit statehood for this six square mile micro-polity which has become the drug and murder capital of the country, if not the world. I wrote last year suggesting that the Congress should reassume control of the District, appointing an experienced and honest administrator and chief of police as was done under the previous system which worked successfully for almost 180 years.
I hope you have read the op. ed . piece in Sunday's Washington Post by former D. C. General Counsel Lawrence Mirel (p. C-8) which puts forward an even more attractive suggestion: retrocede the District to the State of Maryland as the rest of the District, now constituting Arlington County, was to Virginia in 1801. Mr. Mirel makes a good case that this would solve several problems at once: it would subject the City to the oversight of state authority, it would remove the issue of second class citizenship based on the argument that D.C. residents can't vote for Senators or Representatives, while avoiding the unattractive alternative of creating two new senate seats for six square miles having no significant geographic interests of its own worthy of independent representation (the raison d'etre for the Great Compromise which allocated equal representation in the Senate for each state). As Mirel notes, two-thirds of the functions carried out by the D.C. Council and Mayor are state functions, not local ones anyway. Maryland could reassume these functions, relieving city government of several of its apparently unsolvable burdens, economizing on administrative overhead, reducing budgetary needs and, hopefully, resulting in lowering the local tax burden.
I hope you will examine the proposal and support hearings to get the idea launched before the situtation in the District deteriorates further.
Sincerely,
David B. Timmins
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