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Rashida Tlaib Says She's Going To Hang Altered American Flag Outside of Her Office in Push for DC Statehood

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Talk about Democratic denial.

Since Donald Trump’s astonishing upset of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, Trump’s opponents have spent almost three years trying to pretend a man they loathe is not the duly elected president of the United States.

Now, Michigan Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib — as obnoxious as any other member of the progressive Democratic “squad” — is open to pretending there aren’t actually just 50 states in the union.

At a hearing Thursday of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to study “statehood” for the District of Columbia, Tlaib told D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser she wanted a flag with 51 stars to display outside her office, as a symbol of her support for upending one more aspect of the Constitution as the Framers devised it.

Tlaib’s exchange with Bowser came up because D.C. statehood advocates had the effrontery last week to display American flags with a 51st star — a mangling of Old Glory for political purposes that should have offended even liberals with a respect for reality.

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“I would love one,” Tlaib said, according to Fox News. “I would love to hang it outside of my office.”

It didn’t make her a lot of fans.

Officially, the point for statehood backers is that there are nearly 700,000 residents of the district who lack representation in the Senate, and have a “delegate” with limited voting privileges in the House, rather than a full representative.

Unofficially, the point for statehood backers is that those 700,000 D.C. residents are overwhelmingly Democrats, so giving D.C. statehood would automatically increase the Democratic Party’s presence in the Senate by two.

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Before the midterm elections expanded their lead, Republicans had a one-vote majority in the Senate, so those two extra Democratic votes could have made a world of difference in the first two years of the Trump presidency.

But modern political bean-counting aside, the statehood backers tend to forget — or ignore — the fact that the Founders of this country specifically wanted the federal government to not be in any one of the states.

Among the powers the Constitution details for Congress in Article I, Section 8 is “To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States.”

Do you think the District of Columbia should be a state?

Liberals love to criticize the Constitution’s limits by saying things like the “Founders could never have imagined …” whatever the problem of the moment is — whether it’s semiautomatic rifles, intercontinental ballistic missiles or the internet. They want to regulate anything that wasn’t already in existence in the summer of 1787.

But no one has to wonder what the Founders meant when it came to the capital of the United States. They wrote it down in black and white, and a state was not what they had in mind, because it would end up destroying the genius design in the consciously limited government they were creating.

It’s a pretty good bet Rashida Tlaib knows that. Muriel Browser probably knows that part of the Constitution by heart — even if she hates it.

What they’re hoping, though, is that most Americans don’t know it, and getting the ones who do know it to ignore it — even if that means faking the American flag in the process.

It’s Democratic denial in action.

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Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He's been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He's been with Liftable Media since 2015. Largely a product of Catholic schools, who discovered Ayn Rand in college, Joe is a lifelong newspaperman who learned enough about the trade to be skeptical of every word ever written. He was also lucky enough to have a job that didn't need a printing press to do it.
Birthplace
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