The Northwest Ordinance...in space?

With the GOP Presidential Primaries behind us and the candidates no longer courting votes from the US Territories in their quest for the nomination, the issue of statehood will probably disappear again from the campaign trail for another four years.

That is, unless, Mitt Romney bucks common sense and for some reason selects former House Speaker Newt Gingrich as his running mate.

You may remember that Gingrich made headlines when the primaries were in full swing for some remarks he made on statehood. It wasn’t his comments on Puerto Rico that grabbed headlines—that honor went to Rick Santorum who falsely claimed that the territory would have to adopt English (and only English) as its official language for Statehood to be a legal possibility.

Instead, Gingrich made headlines for his grandiose plan to colonize the moon and then admit Earth’s celestial cousin to the Union as the51^st state.

That’s right, Gingrich has taken up the cause of statehood for the moon—population zero—while places like Puerto Rico and the District of Columbiaprobably would actually welcome a serious national discussion on such aproposal.

Gingrich, who is known equally for his grandiose thoughts as he isfor his knowledge of US history, even went so far to propose a “Northwest Ordinance for Space” to guide the moon’s accession and other future spacecolonies into the Union.

For those who don’t remember this from US History class, theNorthwest Ordinance was the Congressional Act that first defined a process fororganizing territories and creating new states. Thomas Jefferson wrote it in the 1780's to outline a way for Congress to establish temporary federal control ofthe Northwest Territory--the frontier region east of the Mississippi andnorth of the Ohio River that the United States acquired from Great Britain in1783--and then create several new states from this sparsely populated land.

Under the process defined by the Ordinance, the President was toappoint a governor and other government officers to administer the NorthwestTerritory on the federal government's behalf. Once 5,000 “free male inhabitantsof full age" had settled in the area, a territorial legislature could beelected and a constitution drawn up. Finally, when 60,000 free inhabitants hadsettled in particular portions of the territory, Congress was to carve up theterritory further and admit the regions that met the above-mentioned criteriaas states to the Union “on an equal footing with the original States in allrespects...”

As states and new territories grew out of the old NorthwestTerritory, it soon became apparent that Congress had at its disposal a methodwith which to guide the country’s territorial growth as national leaders casttheir eyes west.

Unsurprisingly, the Northwest Ordinance guided the creation of allor parts of the 21 states that were carved out of the vast Louisiana Territory thatthe United States  obtainedfrom France in 1803. Congress followed these same steps to guide FloridaTerritory, ceded by Spain to the United States in 1819, on the path tostatehood. (In recent years, especially since the 2000 election fiasco,academics have scoured the text of the ordinance to see if there's a mechanismto devolve Florida’s statehood and give it back to Spain. Unfortunately, noneexists.) The same was done for done for the land that was carved out of OregonTerritory and turned into states after 1846.

By the late 19^th century,admitting new states to the Union under the process laid down in the NorthwestOrdinance had become ubiquitous. Some territories took longer to reachstatehood than others (New Mexico, portions of which were acquired via theLouisiana Purchase in 1803, wasn’t admitted to the Union until 1912, whereasCalifornia only spent about two years as a Territory), but all land acquired bythe United States between 1787 and 1852 was eventually transformed into thelower 48 states, more or less guided by the Northwest Ordinance.

However nowhere in the Constitution does it say that any of thisneed occur, or that newly-acquired territories ever be admitted to the Union asstates at all. Article IV of the Constitution grants sole responsibility fororganizing new possessions into territories, but there is nothing that says newterritories must at some point be transformed intostates. Congress, if it should so choose, could sit on its hands and do nothing aboutstatehood in newly-acquired territories, be they on the Moon or elsewhere.

Unfortunately, this is exactly what happened when the UnitedStates began acquiring populated island territories thousands of miles fromAmerican shores in 1898 as a result of the Spanish-American War. Under theterms of the peace settlement with Spain, the United States acquired a handfulof Spanish colonial outposts, including Puerto Rico and Guam.

But unlike thesparsely-populated lands of the American west that were added to the Americandomain throughout the 19^th century,the insular possessions that the United States acquired during theSpanish-American War were populated by thousands of non-white, non-Englishspeaking residents. Owing to the racial and cultural prejudices of the day,Congress undoubtedly believed that the inhabitants of these new Americanpossessions were unfit for American citizenship, and probably never seriouslyconsidered their islands and island groups as eventual candidates forstatehood. Former president Benjamin Harrison lamented the nature of Americanoverseas expansion, saying that the  UnitedStates had “done something out of line with American history, not in the matterof territorial expansion, but in the character of it.”

Congress’ decision to hold these places in perpetuity asterritories without setting them on the path to statehood was endorsed by theUS Supreme Court in a series of early 20^th century cases known as the InsularCases. Perhaps the most noteworthy concept to emerge from these cases was theidea that the US Constitution need not apply in full to possessions like PuertoRico or Guam, or, eventually, American Samoa, the US Virgin Islands, or theNorthern Mariana Islands. Instead, Congress has the ability to create lawwithin territories in certain circumstances—particularly pertaining torevenue—that the Constitution would not allow for for states within the Union.And so the situation has remained for the better part of a century.

So it was odd to hear Newt Gingrich talk about statehood for hisimaginary moon colony as millions of real, non-lunar Americans are todaywithout states of their own. To hear Gingrich propose reviving the NorthwestOrdinance for this task was especially troubling, given that Congress decidedto throw the Northwest Ordinance’s precepts out the window rather than face theprospect of admitting minority-majority territories into the Union on an equalfooting with the states.

At best, statehood advocates outside the continental US sawGingrich’s musings the way the media and most mainlanders did, as Gingrichespousing yet another ridiculous but ultimately dead-end idea. At worst, it wasa reminder of the horrible prejudice and racial policies that prevented thespirit of Manifest Destiny from being applied to the insular possessions in thefirst place.