Steve Dutch
Jul 25, 2017 · 1 min read

There’s nothing illegal about creating some other variant of the existing star design. Congress creates an official design for government use but other variants are legal.

The solution for DC is already at hand. Originally, the District was a perfect square, partly in Virginia. It was actually divided into two counties with the Potomac being the boundary. In the 1840’s, the Virginia section was returned to Virginia. It had already been cut out of any Federal power by rules requiring Federal offices to be on the Maryland side. The Constitution requires the seat of government to be a separate district, “not a part of any State.” So redraw the boundaries to include the Capitol, the Mall, the White House, and all major offices, with minimum permanent residents, and return the rest to Maryland.

Fun factoid: all the north-south State lines in the West are a few miles west of the nearest degree meridian, because at the time there was no global standard of longitude. So the boundaries were defined with respect to the Naval Observatory in Washington. Except, curiously, California-Nevada, which was defined as 120 degrees west of Greenwich, even though Greenwich would not be the global standard for 30+ years. Possibly, given San Francisco’s status as a port, enough people were familiar with Greenwich nautical charts to think in terms of Greenwich.

    Steve Dutch

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