Earlier this week, the District of Columbia submitted three design proposals for the D.C. Quarter to be released next year:
Forget the fragile cherry blossoms and cuddly panda bears. The District has decided to seek a tougher message on its new commemorative quarter: a protest of its lack of full voting rights.
The only question is whether the U.S. Mint will go along.
Yesterday, the District submitted three ideas for its quarter, part of a popular program that has produced coins representing each of the 50 states. One would feature the three stars and two bars of the D.C. flag; another would portray Benjamin Banneker, the 18th-century abolitionist who helped survey the city; and another would depict jazz great Duke Ellington, a D.C. native.
Each design would include the inscription “Taxation Without Representation” or “No Taxation Without Representation.”
It was bad enough when they put their stupid little slogan on the license plates we all have to look at every day around here, but placing it on a quarter that will circulate for two decades or more is just plain juvenile.
Well, today, only one day after the designs were submitted, the Mint came back with the expected answer:
Wow, that was fast. The U.S. Mint pretty much set a government speed record in rejecting the District government’s proposal to put the words “Taxation Without Representation” on the D.C. quarter that will be issued as part of the 50 States coin program.
Mayor Adrian Fenty’s in-your-face proposal “does not comply with the law that authorizes the D.C. commemorative quarter-dollar coin,” the Mint says in a statement just issued.
“Changing how the District of Columbia (the Seat of Government of the United States ) is represented in Congress is a contemporary political issue on which there presently is no national consensus and over which reasonable minds differ. Although the United States Mint expresses no position on the merits of this issue, we have determined that the proposed inscription is clearly controversial and, therefore, inappropriate as an element of design for United States coinage.”
So it’s back to the drawing board.
Since Marion Barry is still part of city government, there is one possible suggestion.
February 27th, 2008 at 10:27 pm
If they wanted to be honest, they’d try “Consumption without Production.”