Committee of Correspondence for Puerto Rico Self-Determination

Before Columbia University journalism professor and recent New York Times editorialist Michael Janeway (“Puerto Rico’s Moment in the Sun” May 22) publishes the up-coming book he touts about Puerto Rico under American rule, he owes it to his publisher and his journalism students to check his facts, as well as the judgments and conclusions he bases on the historical facts.   

For example, he asserts that 4 million U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico pay no federal income taxes but enjoy “entitlement” to Social Security benefits anyway, as if this is some sort of windfall that makes “commonwealth” a good deal.  The truth is that the residents of Puerto Rico pay the same payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare as citizens in the states, but they receive benefits under both programs at a lower level than their fellow citizens in the states. 

This is one of many discriminatory federal policies – including denial of voting rights in federal elections – upheld by flawed federal court interpretations of the undemocratic “commonwealth” system for administration of Puerto Rico, as implemented under federal statutory policy enacted pursuant to the virtually unrestrained territorial powers of Congress.

The NYT editorial is also flat wrong that Puerto Rico’s Spanish language and heritage made “New Mexico-style Americanization leading to statehood..out of the question.”   New Mexico was a Spanish speaking territory when admitted to the union, and the state constitution prohibited discrimination based on language.   Issues of cultural transition aside, just like Hawaii, Alaska, Louisiana and, for that matter, Texas or California, Puerto Rico has been fully eligible for statehood historically since U.S. citizenship was conferred in 1917, and politically enabled to petition Congress for statehood (or independence, for that matter) since it became internally self-governing under a local constitution in 1952.

Janeway’s historical exegesis seems oddly aimless, taking us on a trip to nowhere, with intriguing facts, but leaving us at a dead end, with the subliminal suggestion that tolerating the undemocratic status quo, or pretending it is something it is not, would be better than making painful choices required to redeem democratic values.   Could that be his actual purpose? 

An objective analysis is that Congress has failed to define the real democratic status options, including statehood or nationhood, as it did for 32 territories that with U.S. citizen populations that became states, 1 territory with a non-citizen population that became independent (Philippines), and 3 U.S. administered territories with non-citizens populations that became nations under “free association” treaties with the USA. 

Thus, the real historical anomaly in American rule over Puerto Rico is the separation of U.S. citizenship from federal status policy, as practiced by Congress and the federal courts in the case of Puerto Rico, which made Puerto Rico the only large and heavily populated territory granted U.S. citizenship but left in a political status limbo for 9 decades.   That gave rise to a local partisan ideology that features of statehood and independence could be combined in a “new commonwealth” status that did not require the historical choice between nationhood and statehood. 

Congress and the federal courts considered whether that hybrid status model was feasible, but ultimately rejected as unconstitutional.    The 2005 and 2007 reports by the President’s Task Force on Puerto Rico’s Poltiical Status provide the road map for status resolution based on constitutional and historical  precedents.   

Still, Janeway calls for the next president to create yet another commission to address the problem, but President Clinton already did that eight years ago, creating the non-partison federal interagency task force on Puerot Rico’s status, the above-referenced reports of which Janeway inexplicably ignores.

Finally, both national political parties hold primaries in Puerto Rico, and the results have always counted just as much as other states with late primaries.   This year is no different, and Puerto Rico probably will not decide anything that Pennsylvania and North Carolina, or Oregon and Kentucky, couldn’t.   Other than helping the national parties choose candidates, primaries in Puerto Rico mostly serve to remind us that only states are represented in the Electoral College and Congress.  

Instead of a NYT’s op-ed obsessing about Puerto Rico’s past to befuddle us with anachronisms, we all need to focus on what its future can be if the historical and constitutional precedents for territorial status resolution are followed by Congress, through self-determination leading to a fully democratic status with equal rights and duties of national citizenship.

That means statehood or true non-colonial nationhood, not a policy favoring endless continuation of territorial status, with quasi-autonomy under a neo-colonial “commonwealth”  system, without informed self-determination on other options, sustained only by federal subsidies and a sense of national ambivalence about democracy for 4 million of our fellow Americans. 

If his NYT op-ed on PR history is any indication, professor Michael Janeway’s planned book on Puerto Rico may turn out to be as unilluminating as recent “scholarship” commissioned by the pro-commonwealth party in the territory - including Aleinikoff’s political fantasies in “Semblances of Sovereignty”; Rezvani’s absurd “conventional retrenchment” theory; or, Reisman’s apology for “New Commonwealth”

More, much more, on those other highly questionable  works to come…