Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia’s representative to Congress, has an op-ed in the WaPo urging those of us who live in the district not to forget to vote in the first-in-the-nation presidential primary on Tuesday. I say: Don’t indulge them. The primary is supposed to be a vehicle to “unmask a shameful civic deprivation.” That deprivation: the District doesn’t have home rule. We are “denied” the right to have a voting representative in Congress. But that is the way the Founding Fathers set up the federal city. There is nothing wrong with this, and I am furthermore not in favor of giving more power to officials an ill-run city. There is a popular pro-home rule T-shirt in my liberal Adams-Morgan neighborhood. It says, “No Taxation without Representation.” This is about half right. Why not lift federal taxation and allow the district to blossom into a Hong Kong-like tax free zone? It would be interesting to see if the home rulers would pick a power grab over tax relief. I have a horrible feeling that they’d pick paying taxes. The hallmark of the liberal is the love of taxes.
