Here's the deal. Wyoming we're sorry, but you're just too small. Why your 600,000 citizens wouldn't even make a decent sized town like Baltimore.

You're too tiny for two senators and a representative.

Starting the next session of Congress, you will have a non-voting delegate and a shadow congressional delegation to handle your district's lobbying, pork and other constituent services. Oh and, by the way, your annual budget will need approval from Congress now that you're being reformed as the District of Wyoming

Residents of the district will still be responsible for federal income taxes, unlike Guam, Puerto Rico and the lesser US Territories.

Signed, by executive order, this 4th day of July, 2007, George W. Bush.

And the number one reason this could never happen is... yet this is the plight of the citizen of Washington, District of Columbia, United States of America.

DC for short.

Just to give you the setup, I got an e-mail from someone I know in DC, asking me to write my senators. The bill which made its way through the House, adding two seats to the 435, one to DC, one to Utah, is pending in the Senate.

If an unofficial cloture majority is counted beforehand, it is promised to go to the floor for debate and final passage. If the gasbags prevail, it won't even be docketed.

So I wrote Senators Bingaman and Domenici, something short enough not to be discarded and rambling enough not to have been copied and pasted from interest group boilerplate. In short, I asked what about this 21st century case of taxation without representation? Isn't the Boston Tea Party the most etched, iconic, definitive image of the birth of America?

The rest of us, we're all cozy in our own private Wyomings, aren't we? Not really our concern. For shame.

This DC Voting Rights Act of 2007 is an insult to sausage making, but take a closer look at the alternatives before any thought of pooh-poohing. Obviously, leaving things alone has worked just fine for everyone but DC residents and/or fans of self-determination everywhere for a long, long time. Tellingly, Dick Cheney doesn't even stay there to desquamate.

Part of former DC, below the Potomac, is already Virginia, so why not add the remainder to Maryland? For starters, every referendum on the matter has favored statehood, not adulteration. Free will over fiat.

In the above, absurd example, it would be like offering Wyomingites the option to divide in six and belong respectively to Utah, Colorado, Nebraska, South Dakota, Montana and Idaho. Thank goodness, for them, statehood has the sustaining power of 117 years of momentum.

Full, flat out statehood for DC - why not that? Because giving two senators to nothing more than a city the size of Baltimore scares the bejesus out of the same kinds of people who would dissect the ramifications of Senator Johnson's brain surgery before the pentathol has even worn off.

One could reasonably predict the state of DC to be, not just blue, but urban blue. (And bigger than the state of Wyoming.)

Forget that it rights a wrong, for just a minute. Now repeat ad infinitum. This is what drives DC residents apoplectic. It's always about what any change would do to the political landscape of the country and not what interest should prevail.

Remember - Guamanians pay no income tax. DC residents do.

The Senate has the perfect opportunity. Though leading Republican thinkers endorse this bill, it will be up to (mostly) Republican senators to signal leader Reid their willingness to close it out. Pete Domenici has had an epiphany of sorts over Iraq; perhaps he's found the golden mean in his golden years. I urged him to support the bill purely on the grounds of representation.

I'm asking the manifold savvy readers to drop a line to their senators before the measure winds up in scheduling limbo. If this thing fails, then I will strongly urge Senators Bingaman and Domenici to support the Okay Then, No Taxation Act of 2008.