The fact of U.S. territories is a conundrum. What, after all, is the difference between a territory and a colony? Why does the U.S. own the Virgin Islands way down in the Caribbean?
That's not the only U.S. "possession" in that part of the world. There's also the island of Puerto Rico, formerly held as a "protectorate." What it is being protected from is another mystery. Currently, it's defined as a commonwealth.
And way out in the far flung reaches of the South Pacific there are 12 U.S. possessions, all of them islands.
These "territories" are subject to U.S. laws and jurisdiction. The indigenous people of Puerto Rico, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands have U.S. citizenship, and as such, can freely come and go to the mainland.
While they vote to elect their governments, they cannot vote in U.S. presidential elections, but they can and do elect delegates to the U.S. House of Representatives.
For a while, those representatives were granted limited voting rights in the federal body. The territorial reps could vote on pending legislation as long as their votes were not decisive to the passage or defeat of a bill or law, thus rendering territorial votes essentially symbolic.
Now they don't even have that.
Last week, one of the first acts of the newly minted Republican majority was to take even that limited franchise away from the "territories."
That led to the ironic photograph of the new Speaker of the House John Boehner swearing in Donna Christenson, the representative of the Virgin Islands, only an hour before his party's majority stripped her of the right to cast any votes in that august body.
Christenson is one rung below Eleanor Holmes Norton, D.C.'s delegate to Congress, who can vote in committee but not on final passage of legislation.
So why are there any territories at all?
After World War II, the U.S. prodded, goaded, and did everything it could to persuade the British to give up its empire. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, the Brits did just that, morphing into a confederation of practically independent states with ties to the mother country.
The U.S., however, chose to hold onto the islands it seized in the South Pacific and the Caribbean, dubbing them "territories," subject to American laws and jurisdiction. This hasn't always worked out very well for their indigenous populations.
In the 1970s, U.S. labor laws in the Northern Mariana Islands were suspended. Multi-national corporations rushed in, swamping the islands with sweatshops and enticing foreign laborers from China and the Philippines to immigrate to the islands.
The workers, who signed contracts, found themselves living in a sort of peonage, working long hours for low wages, churning out garments labeled made in the U.S., which is technically correct given the Marianas' status as a "territory."
How can you tell people under the control of the U.S. they don't have a say in the U.S. federal government? And what is the difference between a territory and a colony? Why would a democracy have them?