Ever-smoldering status issue flares up in D.C.

Robert Friedman - Puerto Rico Daily Sun
Washington - December 14, 2009

Will still one more locally sponsored status plebiscite move Congress to understand the time has come to help resolve Puerto Rico’s question of all questions?

Hopefully yes, say some longtime veterans of the island’s battle of all battles.

Another island-mandated vote could be on the horizon, given the not-quite-pressing interest so far displayed by congressional and White House leaders in getting Resident Commissioner Pedro Pierluisi’s status bill through the House, then the Senate and onto the president’s desk for his signature.

That’s the talk, at any rate, among status warriors here and on the island. While Gov. Fortuño still publicly holds out hope that the Pierluisi status bill will get on the House docket next year and easily get approved there, he seemed stumped when asked in a recent interview who will push the bill in the Senate during the 2010 election year.

One thing at a time, the governor said. That “one thing” probably will be the same one thing that happened in 1990 and 1998, when the House approved status bills and the Senate took no action on the legislation.

Even Pierluisi raised the possibility of the locally held plebiscite. The New Progressive Party platform calls for such a status vote if Congress does not act on the issue by 2010, he noted.

Amidst the usual, almost always unheeded calls for “consensus” from the politicos out of power, Senate President Thomas Rivera Schatz has said he would meet with the governor to develop “an effective and intelligent strategy” on a local status bill. One of the principle questions at this point is whether the measure will mirror the Pierluisi bill, which calls for two possible votes, the first whether the current commonwealth relationship should be changed, the second, how it should be changed.

In a strange-bedfellows alliance, both Puerto Rico Independence Party official Manuel Rodríguez Orellana and NPP former Senate President Charlie Rodríguez believe in the revival of the 2005 status bill passed unanimously in the Legislature before then-Gov. Acevedo Vilá vetoed it for reasons that reasonable people are still trying to figure out.

In that bill, voters were to decide on whether to ask Congress and the president to commit by a date certain to resolve status through a federally mandated plebiscite among non-colonial and non-territorial options. If Congress once more was to say, “ho-hum,” then a constitutional convention could have been called to present Washington with a solution.

Both Rodríguez Orellana and the NPP’s Rodríguez agree one more local “beauty contest,” in which voters cast ballots on locally approved options—as they did in 1967, 1993 and 1998 — will again have no resonance in Washington.

Rodríguez Orellana said any new local status bill “need not be for a plebiscite,” but a could include a call for a “negotiating committee” composed of local and federal officials, or the constitutional convention that the PIP supports, the Popular Democratic Party sort of supports and the NPP strongly opposes.

“It makes no sense to repeat the past,” status plebiscite-wise, said the PIP’s secretary for North American affairs. Former Senate chief Rodríguez would like, at least, to see the island hold the first plebiscite in the Pierluisi bill — whether Puerto Rican voters want to continue the current political relationship or move to another.

Dispelling arguments

“If the majority vote for a change, that would dispel the argument that Puerto Rico has sent no message to Congress” about its political future, Rodríguez said. Such a vote for change, “gives us new arguments to bring before the U.N. and the O.A.S. and civil rights organizations that this is what the people want and the U.S. should act on it,” he said.

Meanwhile, on the plebiscite-reluctant PDP front, Roberto Prats, PDP official on federal matters and head national Democrat on the island, said he envisions the NPP-controlled Legislature enacting a local version of the Pierluisi bill, which the PDP has opposed with a vehemence.

The only status bill that will get congressional action, said Prats, is one that Congress deems self-executing. And that bill should not have an “ill-conceived” commonwealth option as defined in the Pierluisi bill. The commonwealth option, in fact, should be defined by the PDP, Prats said.

All of which shows, according to the PIP’s Rodríguez Orellana, that the populares “don’t want anything on a status change, ever.” We now turn to Jeffrey Farrow, who has worked on island status in the 1970s and the 1980s in Congress, at the Clinton White House in the 1990s and now advises the Fortuño administration on such matters.

Far and away, the most important thing for Congress, that which could actually get it to act on the results of a local plebiscite, is if the majority votes for a status change “that Congress could grant,” Farrow said. If there are “impossible proposals” in the referendum — i.e. the PDP choice for a Puerto Rico nation indivisible and permanently joined to the U.S. and sharing its citizenships—Congress will run for cover, indicated Farrow.

He insisted that, “It’s never been an issue of whether a status plebiscite is locally or federally mandated. It’s been [for Congress] about the options included in the referendums.”

As far as the 2005 local status bill being resurrected, Farrow had this caveat: “I don’t think it’s ever wise to give Congress a deadline. Even presidents have learned that it’s not the best way to get Congress to act. If Puerto Rico tells Congress to do something by a certain date or we will do something else, Congress will say, ‘OK, do something else’.”

Which means the island could wind up back where it started from, status-wise, prompting the cynics, and many others, among us to say, “ So, what else is new?”