Move the USA Capital

Washington DC provides great benefits to itself, Maryland and Virginia by extracting taxes from the rest of the USA and spending a disproportionate amount of those taxes in the DC Metro area.

It is unfair to the rest of the country that they do not share in this largess and this should be changed.

If you have ever visited or lived in the DC Metro region, you may have noticed the mausoleum like architecture, the charmless neighborhoods, the excessive crime and so forth. The area is an embarrassment to the country.

The solution to this embarrassment and unfairness is to move the USA Capital on a regular basis, perhaps once per century.

This is much simpler than it sounds.

To move the Capital, you only have to move the parts of the government that are the most important parts of the three branches of the government. This means the President, Congress and the Supreme Court, as well as all necessary support functions.

Once they are moved, other agencies and infrastructure will be gravitationally attracted to the new center of government and may choose to move once their leases ended or buildings became obsolete.

Implementation is as simple as a constitutional amendment that mandates the move.

A sample Constitutional Amendment might be:

1) Once per century the Capital is moved to a different location

2) The process for the move will be that, once the amendment is passed, each state will have ten years to put forth a proposal on the siting and infrastructure of the new Capitol.

3) Each proposal will include streets, buildings, amenities and so forth.

4) Once the proposals are submitted, the Congress will each year vote on which proposals are preferred. Whichever proposals are in the bottom half of votes will be deleted.

5) After a number of votes over a few years, eventually one proposal will receive more than fifty percent of the votes, and that will be the selection.

6) Once a site is chosen, the new site will be built out. There will be a time limit of twenty years to fully build out the site.

7) At the twenty-year mark, the capitol will move.

8) No state may have its proposal selected more than once per two millennia. This ensures that at least twenty different states will get the benefit of the Capital.

9) Seventy years after the Capitol is moved, the process will begin again.

This process, while ensuring a greater fairness in economic benefits, will also allow our best architects and builders an opportunity to create a truly impressive Capital, a Capital that all Americans can be pleased with.

If a Constitutional Amendment can be submitted to Congress, it should have no difficulty passing. Every state not in the DC Metro area would stand to benefit so it should have a great deal of support, both in Congress and during ratification.

There are psychological benefits as well, as once per century we would have the feeling of a fresh start less encumbered by past practices.