Our nation’s capital is a city unique in the entire country. Given the often times competitive relationship between the states, our Founding Fathers felt that in order to ensure parity among them, the seat of federal power needed to exist outside of any specific state jurisdiction. Hence the District of Columbia. Washington, D.C. exists as a separate entity within the United States, almost like the Vatican in Italy. While this situation may be beneficial for the nation as a whole, it places Washington in a rather peculiar situation.

Washington, D.C. exists in a sort of political limbo. Unlike other U.S. cities, it has no overarching state structure to subsidize its expenditures. While the Congress is charged with overall stewardship of the city, it is, at best, an absentee landlord. In the studiously self-interested environment of Congress, the needs of the District of Columbia, which maintains only one non-voting representative of its own, and no senators, are seldom a priority to members of Congress beholden to their own electorates. ...

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