Apparently one of those Canadian baseball teams is moving to Washington D.C., which offers the unique opportunity to revive the classic team name “The Washington Senators”. Unfortunately for nostalgic baseball fans, tradition clashed with a local sore spot and the sore spot won :

The Washington Nationals will be born Monday…Team and District officials Friday scheduled an announcement of the new name for the former Montreal Expos franchise for noon at Union Station. The event will come with presentations of newly designed caps and logos. Uniform designs, however, are still not completed.

Leading the event will be team president Tony Tavares, general manager Jim Bowden and District Mayor Anthony A. Williams. Nationals officials Friday were feverishly seeking out players on the current roster and Washington Senators alumni to attend the announcement and celebrate the rebranding.
. . .
Commissioner Bud Selig wanted to resurrect the Senators name, used periodically by Washington’s first American League franchise and exclusively by its second. But Selig acquiesced to the objections of Williams, who felt Senators was inappropriate given the city’s lack of voting representation in Congress.

“I know I was in favor of the Washington Senators, because that’s what they used to be called,” Selig said. “But I guess that’s just not going to happen.”

In other words, “If they don’t let is have senators, you can’t be the senators.”

As far as the DC representation issue is concerned, I’m a little mixed. On the one hand, I really hate that the residents of the less populous “red” states are essentially overrepresented by having the same two senate votes we Californians do, so consistency guides me to reject giving the same three representatives to a city that we do to large states like Alaska and Montana. On the other hand, they’ve already got three electoral votes so shouldn’t the same shitty rules apply to everyone?

It seems to me that if the shoe was on the other foot and D.C. voted 90% Republican instead of Democrat, the GOP would be beating us over the head with the D.C. statehood issue like it was a civil rights issue (in some ways, it is). At least, that’s what I’d expect from the party that gave us Prop. 187 and is now treating skeptical Dems like anti-immigrant bigots for failing to support the Amend for Arnold movement.