More on Puerto Rico

As part of the blog about our new book, Fault Lines in the Constitution, my wife Cynthia and I have just posted a discussion about Puerto Rico.  It doesn't add very much to Gerard's excellent post, save that we hope that at least some of our audience includes the teenagers to whom our book is directed and their teachers.  I do suspect that this will be a decisive moment in the relationship between the US national government and what is now the world's largest remaining colony (defined by the absence of any voting representation in the metropolitan government, unlike, for example, the French territories).  One can only imagine what would be happening if Puerto Rico, which is the same population roughly as Connecticut, had that state's two senators and five members of the House (not to mention seven electoral votes).  I would think, at the very least, that events of the past week have weakened the attraction of Commonwealth status, and I will be curious, should this turn out to be the case, if the defectors support statehood or independence (or, of course, independence should a bigoted Congress reject statehood because the dominant language of Puerto Rico is Spanish.  And, of course, it would be extremely interesting, to put it mildly, to see what the response of the US would be to a truly serious secessionist movement patterned after 1776.