DePosada: Puerto Rico’s ‘Nuclear Option’ On Statehood
By Robert G. DePosada
Special to Roll Call
April 20, 2010, 12 a.m.

Imagine that a majority of Quebec’s citizens, fed up with being part of Canada, voted to become the United States’ 51st state. Then, without the consent of Congress, the French-speaking province brazenly proceeded to elect U.S. Senators and a dozen U.S. Representatives and send them to Washington, D.C., to demand their seats in Congress.

Imagine that the Quebeckers also insisted on speaking French and let it be known that they expected the U.S. to transform itself into an officially bilingual nation like the one that they left behind. I don’t think it would take Americans long to tell the uninvited guests to pack their bags and scram — in blunt Anglo-Saxon English!

Americans are blissfully unaware that something like that hypothetical scenario could start unfolding this fall. The main differences are that it would take place in Puerto Rico, a Caribbean island located more than a thousand miles to our south, rather than a province to our north, and the language involved would be Spanish, not French.

The rabidly pro-statehood New Progressive Party, known by its Spanish acronym, PNP, controls both the governor’s office and the Legislature in the self-governing U.S. Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

Frustrated to the point of apoplexy that Puerto Ricans have rejected statehood and voted to remain a U.S. commonwealth in all three elections in which they have voted on the issue, PNP leaders have decided to exert their one-party control of Puerto Rico’s government to implement their own version of the “nuclear option.â€