Reject the Insular Cases

Floor Speech

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Ms. PLASKETT. Mr. Speaker, today, the House is holding a hearing on the insular cases, doctrines which hold the territories in a perpetual state of colonialism.

Earlier this year, I served as a House impeachment manager in the second trial of President Donald Trump. My presence on the floor of the U.S. Senate carried a great deal of meaning for me. It also said a lot about America.

Although I was making the case, I was unable to actually cast a vote in the House. My constituents in the Virgin Islands, U.S. citizens, remain unable to vote for President, lack any voice in the Senate, and have only a limited vote in the House.

The second-class treatment of the territories is not just unfair; it is un-American. More than 3.5 million Americans are denied the right to vote simply because of where they live, whether it is Puerto Rico; Guam; Northern Mariana Islands; American Samoa; or my home, the Virgin Islands of the United States. This number of people is equivalent to the population of the five smallest States combined, and each of the territories send more men and women to the military per capita than any State.

More than 98 percent of the territorial residents are racial or ethnic minorities like me, a fact that cannot be a mere coincidence in our continuing disenfranchisement, which extends well past the century mark.

Our Nation's Founders never intended our country to work this way. Alexander Hamilton, as a young man, arrived in New York after spending his formative years in my home on St. Croix. He and others risked their lives to reject colonialism. They wanted no part of it. They understood that governments derive their just powers from the consent of those governed.

America has, from its inception, included U.S. territories. The original understanding was that the Constitution provided a promise of full political participation to each resident of a territory through eventual statehood. Until that happened, the Constitution was understood to fully protect their rights.

That promise was broken after the United States began acquiring island territories in 1898. During that time, in a series of decisions known collectively as the insular cases, the Supreme Court invented an unprecedented new category of unincorporated territories whose residents were not on a path to statehood. Which territories the Court determined were unincorporated turned largely on the Justices at the time's view of the people who lived there--people they labeled in those court opinions as half-civilized, savages, alien races, ignorant, and lawless--people like Alexander Hamilton; Camille Pissarro, the founder of Impressionism; Edward Wilmot Blyden, the founder of Pan-Africanism; and me--lawless, savage.

While other racist Supreme Court decisions from that same era by those same Justices--such as Plessy v. Ferguson--have long been overturned, the insular cases remain. The last three administrations-- Bush, Obama, Trump--have all upheld and fought for these same cases. Indeed, our own House Parliamentarian uses the insular cases to deny the people who live in the territories and their representatives full voting rights on this floor.

The ramifications go well beyond just voting. We do pay billions in Federal taxes, yet residents of the U.S. territories are denied and limited access to Federal programs and support. Otherwise, eligible citizens in the territories are denied SSI, leaving our most vulnerable seniors and disabled to fend for themselves. Federal programs like Medicaid, SNAP, child tax credit, and the earned income tax credit are capped or denied altogether.

The Supreme Court will soon tackle questions of Federal discrimination against citizens in the territories in United States v. Vaello-Madero, a case where the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit ruled unconstitutional the arbitrary denial of SSI benefits in Puerto Rico.

The Justice Department should not continue defending this case. The House should not continue to defend and utilize the insular cases to deny people living in the territories basic rights.

Making sure that 3.5 million U.S. citizens can vote is not a partisan issue. Of my four other colleagues in the territories, two are Democrats and two are Republicans. We are not a monolithic people.

Our country has been given a collective opportunity to ask what America is and who we are as a people. These questions extend to America's responsibilities to citizens living in the territories.

Please reject the insular cases.

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