“A revolution began with a sentence 250 years ago,” George Laws Garcia wrote in an essay in the Virginia Pilot. “In the summer heat of 1776, a group of men put ink to parchment and gave voice to an idea that would resound across centuries: All people are created equal, their rights are inherent, and government exists to secure those rights with the consent of the governed.”
“Every July 4 since has been a celebration of that promise, but in this 250th anniversary year, it remains a responsibility to fulfill,” the essay continues. “In Puerto Rico, 3.2 million U.S. citizens live in limbo between democratic inclusion and an unresolved territory status, experiencing second-class citizenship without the full rights and representation promised in the Constitution. Congress must end this injustice by passing legislation creating a legally binding vote on the island of Puerto Rico that offers statehood.”
No more perfect union without Puerto Rico
The Declaration of Independence established the core values of the United States, and the Constitution delineated the steps to take to make these values a real part of the lives of American.s The Preamble to the Constitution begins, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
The goal of the Constitution is to form a more perfect union, but the founders didn’t believe that they already had a perfect union. They knew they were working toward a more perfect union — a structure closer to the promise of the Declaration of Independence, nearer to the dream that was and still is America.
“Yet,” as Laws Garcia, points out in his essay, “today, the residents of Puerto Rico, U.S. citizens since 1917, cannot vote for the president who governs them, have no voting representation in Congress despite contributing to the U.S. Treasury, and remain subject to federal laws they had no hand in shaping. The founding idea that government draws legitimacy from the consent of the governed is, for them, still a promise deferred.”
The faithful U.S. citizens of Puerto Rico do not have the equality that the states have. They do not have the rights and responsibilities of citizens who live in the states. They do not have, since the majority of voters in the 2012 status vote rejected the current territory status, government by consent of the governed. There United States has evolved since 1776 and continues to evolve. We continue to strive toward an ever more perfect Union. The next step toward a more perfect union must be the admission of Puerto Rico as a state.
A birthday gift to the United States
“Two hundred and fifty years after independence was declared, those principles still point the way forward, steady, clear and ongoing,” Laws Garcia concluded. “It is time for the next chapter. It is time for statehood for Puerto Rico.”
This is the year to take action to correct the situation that keeps three million U.S. citizens in an unequal colonial relationship with their native land.
No responses yet