Thursday, June 25, 2020

Wyoming v. DC: The ultimate rural-urban comparison

Today on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Tom Cotton (R-AR), the junior senator from Arkansas, spoke out against statehood for DC.  In doing so, he invoked Wyoming, the least densely populated state in the continental United States.  Colby Ilkowitz and Jenna Portnoy report in the Washington Post: 
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) argued Thursday that the District of Columbia does not deserve to be a state, asserting that while Wyoming has a smaller population, it has a greater right because it’s a “well-rounded working-class state.”

A day before the House votes on legislation to create the 51st state, Cotton cast the years-long effort to lift D.C. to statehood as a power grab by the Democratic Party. In a speech on the Senate floor, he dismissed the District as a city with little to offer other than lobbyists and federal workers. He made no mention of other defining aspects of the city, including its African American history, drawing outrage on social media and rebuke by some Democrats.

“Yes, Wyoming is smaller than Washington by population, but it has three times as many workers in mining, logging and construction, and 10 times as many workers in manufacturing,” Cotton said. “In other words, Wyoming is a well-rounded working-class state.”
 So much to say about this.  One thing I'll say is that Cotton is obviously dog-whistling about race--Wyoming is mostly white, and DC is mostly black.  A more subtle dog whistle, perhaps, is the reference to Wyoming residents being "hard working," the suggestion being that DC residents are not hard working, that black people don't work or don't work as hard as white people. 

Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn) commented in a Tweet: 
Job shaming! Awesome! I’m in. Great idea. This CANNOT go wrong. Let’s rank the virtue of every profession and if your state has too many workers in the bottom 20% you get kicked out of America. Who wants to start??
But it gets worse.  Cotton also said this: 
Would you trust Mayor Bowser to keep Washington safe if she were given the powers of a governor? Would you trust Marion Barry?
And responding to this, I saw a Tweet that compared coronavirus cases in DC (where the virus is tamed, at least from now) to those in Arkansas, where the virus is currently spiking. 

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