I believe Constitutionally, we need to have a federal capital city where there isn’t representation in senate / congress.

But that city doesn’t have to be the size of the current District of Columbia. Congress just needs to designate “DC” as a handful of federal buildings i.e. White House, Capital, Treasury etc. The rest of the city is made a separate state and given representation. In fact if Congress really wanted to they could make it into 15 or 50 separate states, each with two senators, each DC neighborhood a state, and sway the political balance drastically in an instant.

Malcolm Gladwell had a very interesting podcast about this recently and his revisionist history podcast. I think the discussion was that if DC created about 150 states out of the separate neighborhoods and kept one small federal district it would guarantee the former city of DC control of the Senate and therefore control of all legislation.


[Post edited by RML Hoos at 06/17/2020 1:49PM]