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Catherine Mulbrandon

We the People

My hometown of Washington, D.C. is not to be found on the American flag. So I was inspired to redesigned our flag to include the all of the people of United States. Growing up, I was taught the blue rectangle, i.e. the Union, has 50 stars to represent each state while the 13 stripes represent the original English colonies that declared independence. However, DC is not part of any state and like the territories of Puerto Rico, Guam, U.S. Virgin Islands, Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa it doesn’t get a star on the official US flag. I am therefore adding stars to the flag for the people of the District of Columbia and these five U.S. territories. I am also resizing the stars to represent their populations and the population of each state. Finally, the 50 states are displayed in the ordered they entered the Union. While my flag is a representation of the people of the United States, it does not reflect their representation in Congress, especially in the U.S. Senate. According to Article One of the United States Constitution, the residents of a state get 2 votes in the U.S. Senate regardless of population size, e.g., 2 votes for Wyoming’s 580 thousand and 2 votes for California’s 4 million residents while the 4.2 million residents of DC, PR, GU, VI, MP, AS get none. In fact, they don’t have a single voting member in Congress to represent them.
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