Instead, Congress passed the Organic Act of 1871, which revoked the individual charters of the cities of Washington and Georgetown and combined them with Washington County to create a unified territorial government for the entire District of Columbia.
[6] The new government consisted of an appointed governor and 11-member council, a locally elected 22-member assembly, and a board of public works charged with modernizing the city.
[7] The
Seal of the District of Columbia features the date 1871, recognizing the year the District's government was incorporated.
The Act served as the basis of conspiracy theories relating to the
sovereign citizen movement. According to these, the Act would have made the District, and consequently the whole United States, into a corporation.
[12] There is no evidence for these claims, which stem from a misinterpretation of the meaning of the term
municipal corporation used in the Act.
[13][14] The vocabulary used has in fact a wider meaning here, and refers to any group authorized to legally act as a single entity (in this case, an incorporated, organized district of the United States).
This was later revived by supporters of the
QAnon conspiracy theory to falsely claim that former president
Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 19th president of the original United States on March 4, 2021.
[15] This date corresponds to the original
presidential inauguration, before it was moved to January 20 by the
Twentieth Amendment (signed in 1933, 62 years after the Act, and thus - falsely - claimed to be invalid).