D.C.’s Lack Of Statehood Is An Issue Of White Supremacy. Here’s How It Could Change.
Natalie Gontcharova
4/22/2021
For Ty Hobson-Powell, his hometown of D.C. means go-go music, basketball culture, and mumbo sauce. The city is not the monuments or what you see on CNN for natives like him; it’s the Black-owned businesses on U Street, from Ben’s Chili Bowl to Lee’s Flower Shop, it’s Moechella, the go-go festival, recently held in front of the historic Howard Theatre, it’s the distinct way some natives talk. But ever since Hobson-Powell was old enough to be aware of it, D.C. has also been a place where he and his family and friends are disenfranchised because of a centuries-long practice, rooted in white supremacy, through which 700,000 residents — who, until recent waves of gentrification, were predominantly Black — pay taxes every year but don’t have representation in Congress.
“At first, it was seeing the reminders that we don’t have statehood, one just being the tags on the cars here that say ‘Taxation Without Representation,’” Hobson-Powell tells Refinery29. “You get online, you go shopping for something, you’re placing an order, and you notice that D.C. doesn’t come up in the state section. It was that kind of elementary exploration that I experienced in my younger days around D.C. statehood.”
Hobson-Powell became involved in the statehood movement shortly after graduating college at 15 years old, hoping to advance the rights of the residents of the place where he grew up. He is now an outreach strategist and issue advocate at 51 for 51, an organization that advocates for making D.C. the 51st state, and the founder of Concerned Citizens D.C.
Statehood has more momentum now than at any other point in recent history. Today, the Democratic-led House is expected to pass H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act, which has 220 House and 44 Senate cosponsors. President Joe Biden’s administration this week officially supported statehood by issuing a policy position, which is the strongest backing the issue has ever gotten from the White House. And 54% of voters nationwide agree with making D.C. a state, according to a new national poll. This is the highest level of documented support to date.
In contrast with the ‘90s during the Clinton presidency, when more than 100 Democrats joined Republicans in opposing a D.C. statehood bill, almost every Democratic member of the House has co-sponsored D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton’s H.R. 51, which passed the chamber for the first time last year on a party-line vote. The legislation, however, does not have enough votes to clear the narrowly Democratic-led Senate, where the archaic filibuster rule means it needs 60 votes to pass. But many prominent senators are behind statehood, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand, and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has promised to bring the issue to the floor.
“Congress can no longer exclude D.C. residents from the democratic process, forcing residents to watch from the sidelines as Congress votes on laws that affect the nation or votes even on the laws of the duly elected D.C. government,” Norton, who is allowed to propose legislation but not vote on it, said last week, when the House Oversight and Reform Committee voted to advance the bill. “Democracy requires much more.”
While some lawmakers — particularly Republicans — in the Capitol treat statehood as a removed, theoretical issue, the city’s disenfranchisement has affected residents in very real and tangible ways. After violent white supremacists stormed the Capitol on January 6, Mayor Muriel Bowser didn’t have full power to protect residents. And during protests for racial justice last summer, Trump commanded national forces to tear gas protestors on D.C.’s streets. “We saw the deployment of the National Guard against peaceful protestors back in June, just for a photo op by President Trump at the time, against the will of local leadership,” says Hobson-Powell. “We saw January 6 and how D.C.’s lack of statehood left Washingtonians held hostage to white supremacy as requests were being made from the Mayor’s office to activate the National Guard because she needed permission to do the things she was already empowered to do when elected.” Hobson-Powell himself was on the forefront of the Black Lives Matter protests in D.C., and was arrested in August with over 60 other protestors who were seeking justice for Breonna Taylor.
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Demi Stratmon, also an organizer for 51 for 51, says, “This system in place has always made D.C. residents and our communities not secure. We were always in a position where if something like [January 6] happened, we were at risk. Trump is an example of [how politicians] can make D.C. a photo op and place the residents here at risk for political gain.”
Stratmon says she first became involved in this issue while attending Dartmouth College, where she started traveling around the country with political campaigns and seeing how voters in states like Iowa and New Hampshire were treated versus people in her home city of D.C. in terms of the value of their vote. While at college, she also noticed that when students were encouraged to contact their representatives on issues, she was left out.
Demi Stratmon, also an organizer for 51 for 51, says, “This system in place has always made D.C. residents and our communities not secure. We were always in a position where if something like [January 6] happened, we were at risk. Trump is an example of [how politicians] can make D.C. a photo op and place the residents here at risk for political gain.”
Stratmon says she first became involved in this issue while attending Dartmouth College, where she started traveling around the country with political campaigns and seeing how voters in states like Iowa and New Hampshire were treated versus people in her home city of D.C. in terms of the value of their vote. While at college, she also noticed that when students were encouraged to contact their representatives on issues, she was left out.
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Aside from security, there are countless other ways in which residents have been affected by the lack of statehood. “Coronavirus recovery and how D.C.’s lack of statehood led to us being shorted hundreds of millions of dollars in relief funds from the CARES Act” is a major issue, says Hobson-Powell. “And as a result, we were left in a position that was less than adequate to provide services for a pandemic that we’ve seen has claimed a lot lives here that have been majority Black and brown.”
Jamal Holtz, another organizer at 51 for 51 and a commissioner on the D.C. Mayor’s Commission on Juvenile Justice Reform, says for him, it was about healthcare.
“It was 2014 when there was a huge discussion around the Affordable Care Act,” Holtz tells Refinery29. “That was something that was groundbreaking for me and my family, for my mom who didn’t have access to health insurance or preventative care. [It] shaped my family’s medical stability. So I started to advocate for it, and there was a lot of conversation about ‘call your senator and tell them to vote for the Affordable Care Act’ because it was a close vote. At that point I realized my advocacy ended at the mayor’s office, that I wasn’t able to go to the Hill and talk to my shadow senators, who didn’t have a vote on these issues.”
The issue is tragically reflected in gun violence, too. “D.C. is, as far as laws on the books are concerned, one of the most progressive locales in America, but because of a lack of representation and inability to vote on issues like red-flag laws and background checks, there are still guns from other states with laxer regulations that are coming into our streets, wreaking havoc on our young men and young women, causing violent deaths, oftentimes in young people under the age of 25 and Black and brown youth,” Hobson-Powell says. Too often, the guns discovered at homicide scenes in D.C. are found to have been illegally brought in from neighboring states like Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas. D.C. police recovered 1,000 illegal guns in the city in 2019, the year 11-year-old Karon Brown was gunned down.
Washington, D.C., was created at the beginning of the 19th century as a concession to Southern, slave-holding states, whose representatives wanted to move the capital, which was then in Philadelphia, further south. At first, its residents were able to vote for their own local government, and during Reconstruction it became the first place in the U.S. to grant suffrage to Black residents.
Soon after, however, formerly enslaved people coming from the South began to populate the city, and pushback from conservatives took away residents’ rights to choose their own local government by the end of the 1800s. It wasn’t until 1973 that Home Rule, or the right to elect the mayor and City Council members, was restored. In 1980, 60% of D.C. voters supported a referendum to establish a state constitution, which was a big step for statehood. But the statehood movement stalled in the next decades, and presidents including Clinton and Obama voiced support for the issue, but never did much outright to make statehood viable. In 2016, Mayor Bowser called for a new referendum on statehood, and this time it was backed by 86% of voters, in part thanks to the advocacy of organizations like 51 for 51.
But statehood still faces fierce opposition from Republicans, who argue it is unconstitutional because the Constitution called for the creation of a federal district. Sen. Mitch McConnell, not a D.C. native, called the prospect of D.C. statehood “full-bore socialism.” Democrats, however, say that Norton’s bill would not eliminate this district but only change its borders. Additionally, advocates believe Republicans oppose D.C. statehood so vehemently because it is such a heavily Democratic area, with 92% of voters backing Biden over Trump last year; if D.C. becomes a state, it would certainly give Democrats two more Senate seats. The fact that D.C. would be the first plurality Black state if it became the 51st state is no coincidence here, either.
“I remember hearing commentary from Republicans throughout the course of this that said D.C. doesn’t have ‘real people,’” says Hobson-Powell. “It feels a lot like dog-whistling to me, because I feel pretty real myself, and the over 700,000 majority Black and brown residents here feel pretty real as well.”
With Republicans unlikely to come around, Stasha Rhodes, the campaign manager at 51 for 51, says the only way to make statehood a reality is to eliminate the filibuster (that said, there are plenty of other good reasons to get rid of the filibuster).
“The filibuster is an arcane Jim Crow relic that makes the Senate more undemocratic,” Rhodes tells Refinery29. “It has a long history of blocking civil rights bills, including over 200 anti-lynching laws. We must abolish the filibuster if we plan to enact structural change and uplift the voices of Black and brown folks. The Senate is unequal and undemocratic in that it over-represents smaller, white states.” She adds, “And, there’s only been 11 Black senators — [Raphael] Warnock’s the 11th.”
Despite the renewed energy around D.C. statehood, it seems unlikely that it can become a reality absent major filibuster reform. However, advocates are optimistic that the tide has turned, and the time has finally come to recognize D.C. as a state.
“Yes, I absolutely think it will happen,” says Stratmon. “Right now, Democrats are in control of Congress, the Senate, and we have, in the White House, two leaders who supported 51 for 51, who supported D.C. becoming the 51st state with 51 votes or less in the Senate. So I think the time is now — it’s inevitable. And we have to make sure we don’t waste any more time.”
Aside from security, there are countless other ways in which residents have been affected by the lack of statehood. “Coronavirus recovery and how D.C.’s lack of statehood led to us being shorted hundreds of millions of dollars in relief funds from the CARES Act” is a major issue, says Hobson-Powell. “And as a result, we were left in a position that was less than adequate to provide services for a pandemic that we’ve seen has claimed a lot lives here that have been majority Black and brown.”
Jamal Holtz, another organizer at 51 for 51 and a commissioner on the D.C. Mayor’s Commission on Juvenile Justice Reform, says for him, it was about healthcare.
“It was 2014 when there was a huge discussion around the Affordable Care Act,” Holtz tells Refinery29. “That was something that was groundbreaking for me and my family, for my mom who didn’t have access to health insurance or preventative care. [It] shaped my family’s medical stability. So I started to advocate for it, and there was a lot of conversation about ‘call your senator and tell them to vote for the Affordable Care Act’ because it was a close vote. At that point I realized my advocacy ended at the mayor’s office, that I wasn’t able to go to the Hill and talk to my shadow senators, who didn’t have a vote on these issues.”
The issue is tragically reflected in gun violence, too. “D.C. is, as far as laws on the books are concerned, one of the most progressive locales in America, but because of a lack of representation and inability to vote on issues like red-flag laws and background checks, there are still guns from other states with laxer regulations that are coming into our streets, wreaking havoc on our young men and young women, causing violent deaths, oftentimes in young people under the age of 25 and Black and brown youth,” Hobson-Powell says. Too often, the guns discovered at homicide scenes in D.C. are found to have been illegally brought in from neighboring states like Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas. D.C. police recovered 1,000 illegal guns in the city in 2019, the year 11-year-old Karon Brown was gunned down.
Washington, D.C., was created at the beginning of the 19th century as a concession to Southern, slave-holding states, whose representatives wanted to move the capital, which was then in Philadelphia, further south. At first, its residents were able to vote for their own local government, and during Reconstruction it became the first place in the U.S. to grant suffrage to Black residents.
Soon after, however, formerly enslaved people coming from the South began to populate the city, and pushback from conservatives took away residents’ rights to choose their own local government by the end of the 1800s. It wasn’t until 1973 that Home Rule, or the right to elect the mayor and City Council members, was restored. In 1980, 60% of D.C. voters supported a referendum to establish a state constitution, which was a big step for statehood. But the statehood movement stalled in the next decades, and presidents including Clinton and Obama voiced support for the issue, but never did much outright to make statehood viable. In 2016, Mayor Bowser called for a new referendum on statehood, and this time it was backed by 86% of voters, in part thanks to the advocacy of organizations like 51 for 51.
But statehood still faces fierce opposition from Republicans, who argue it is unconstitutional because the Constitution called for the creation of a federal district. Sen. Mitch McConnell, not a D.C. native, called the prospect of D.C. statehood “full-bore socialism.” Democrats, however, say that Norton’s bill would not eliminate this district but only change its borders. Additionally, advocates believe Republicans oppose D.C. statehood so vehemently because it is such a heavily Democratic area, with 92% of voters backing Biden over Trump last year; if D.C. becomes a state, it would certainly give Democrats two more Senate seats. The fact that D.C. would be the first plurality Black state if it became the 51st state is no coincidence here, either.
“I remember hearing commentary from Republicans throughout the course of this that said D.C. doesn’t have ‘real people,’” says Hobson-Powell. “It feels a lot like dog-whistling to me, because I feel pretty real myself, and the over 700,000 majority Black and brown residents here feel pretty real as well.”
With Republicans unlikely to come around, Stasha Rhodes, the campaign manager at 51 for 51, says the only way to make statehood a reality is to eliminate the filibuster (that said, there are plenty of other good reasons to get rid of the filibuster).
“The filibuster is an arcane Jim Crow relic that makes the Senate more undemocratic,” Rhodes tells Refinery29. “It has a long history of blocking civil rights bills, including over 200 anti-lynching laws. We must abolish the filibuster if we plan to enact structural change and uplift the voices of Black and brown folks. The Senate is unequal and undemocratic in that it over-represents smaller, white states.” She adds, “And, there’s only been 11 Black senators — [Raphael] Warnock’s the 11th.”
Despite the renewed energy around D.C. statehood, it seems unlikely that it can become a reality absent major filibuster reform. However, advocates are optimistic that the tide has turned, and the time has finally come to recognize D.C. as a state.
“Yes, I absolutely think it will happen,” says Stratmon. “Right now, Democrats are in control of Congress, the Senate, and we have, in the White House, two leaders who supported 51 for 51, who supported D.C. becoming the 51st state with 51 votes or less in the Senate. So I think the time is now — it’s inevitable. And we have to make sure we don’t waste any more time.”
The fight for DC statehood gets its best chance yet
Jerusalem Demsas
4/22/2021
It’s difficult to walk around Washington, DC, without spotting at least one car with a license plate reading “taxation without representation.” The callback to the American Revolution’s rallying cry is also a reference to the reality that the roughly 700,000 people who reside in the nation’s capital have no representation in Congress despite paying federal taxes
It’s difficult to walk around Washington, DC, without spotting at least one car with a license plate reading “taxation without representation.” The callback to the American Revolution’s rallying cry is also a reference to the reality that the roughly 700,000 people who reside in the nation’s capital have no representation in Congress despite paying federal taxes
.
© Alex Wong/Getty Images A Washington, DC, “Taxation Without Representation” license plate is seen in 2013 on the limousine of then-Vice President Joe Biden in Washington, DC.
Now, in a party-line vote, Democrats have approved DC statehood, sending the bill to the Democratically controlled Senate — where even a party-line vote would still not be sufficient to send the legislation to President Joe Biden’s desk. And that itself isn’t guaranteed; according to reporting by POLITICO, not even all 50 Democratic Senators have signaled their support for the bill (the five outstanding are Sens. Angus King (I-VT), Joe Manchin (D-WV), Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), Mark Kelly (D-AZ), and Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH)).
The vote came just days after the White House put out an official statement of support for the bill, arguing “for far too long, the more than 700,000 people of Washington, D.C. have been deprived of full representation in the U.S. Congress.”
This is not the first time statehood has made it to the House floor. Just last year, House Democrats voted 232-180 in favor of statehood, making it “the first time in the nation’s history that either house of Congress approved legislation granting full statehood and congressional representation” to the District, Vox’s Ian Millhiser reported at the time.
But, the best chance yet still isn’t much of one: The bill — like last time — is likely to join countless others languishing under the might of the Senate filibuster.
While the debate over statehood has centered largely on how it would affect the political composition of Congress (92 percent of DC voters selected Biden in 2020), the district’s lack of statehood and limited control of local affairs has led to tangible policy harms for its residents — from being unable to enact locally popular health care policies to losing out on over $700 million in CARES Act relief funding last year.
“Most people, when they find out that their own nation’s capital [doesn’t] have the same rights they have — they’re ashamed,” the district’s non-voting delegate, Eleanor Norton Holmes, told Vox. “Ashamed to live in the only country which does not give the residents of their nation’s capital the same rights that everyone else in the country has. No American wants to have that distinction.”
That’s not exactly right. A Data for Progress poll conducted in February found that while a majority (54 percent) of voters agree with making DC a state, 35 percent of voters oppose it, including 56 percent of Republicans. In a March Rasmussen poll, only 29 percent of adults favored statehood with 55 percent against. FiveThirtyEight looked at both polls and noted that Data for Progress’s question primed voters to support statehood, and in the Rasmussen poll, the wording primed them to oppose it. That could indicate the majority of Americans don’t have a strong opinion on DC statehood one way or the other, so how pollsters frame the question matters a great deal.
What is DC losing out on without statehood?
Proponents of statehood point to several ways DC residents have lost out under the current paradigm — most recently, while trying to weather the pandemic.
“In the first Covid relief package we were shortchanged millions of dollars,” Stasha Rhodes, campaign manager of 51 for 51, an organization fighting for statehood, told Vox.
The $2 trillion CARES Act, which provided relief last March as Covid-19 began to ravage the nation, classified DC as a territory rather than a state. As such, instead of being granted the minimum of $1.25 billion guaranteed to each state, it would receive only $500 million, the Washington Post reported. DC has a larger population than both Vermont and Wyoming, which received $1.25 billion in aid, each.
“Arbitrary and out of the norm,” is how DC Vote’s Executive Director Bo Shuff described this classification. “It is typical in spending bills that we’re categorized as a state.”
It wasn’t until Congress passed the American Rescue Plan Act under President Joe Biden and a Democrat-controlled Senate that DC received the money it would have if it had been classified as a state originally.
Covid-19 is only the tip of the iceberg, Shuff tells Vox. As Vox’s German Lopez has explained, DC has only had a sitting local government since 1973, when Congress passed the Home Rule Act. And even that amount of local control is somewhat constrained:
Prior to the Home Rule Act, Congress set DC’s laws. The Home Rule Act made it so the local government could approve its own laws, although only after 30 or 60 days of congressional review depending on the type of policy. Congress can also block DC’s laws through budgetary requirements.
Shuff said that congressional oversight has led to DC’s inability to legalize, tax, and regulate marijuana; the congressional prohibition against using local funds for abortion care for low-income women is also a sore subject.
“But the biggest one that stands out in my head goes all the way back to the ’80s and early ’90s when we were banned and prevented from implementing a needle exchange program to reduce HIV and AIDS transmission amongst intravenous drug users,” Shuff explained.
The ban was lifted, and Vox’s German Lopez reports the city “adopted a needle exchange program to combat its HIV epidemic [and] needle-caused HIV cases dropped by 80 percent, from 149 in 2007 to 30 in 2011, according [to] a report from the DC Department of Health.”
“So now we’re dealing with two instances where lack of statehood has killed Washingtonians,” Shuff said.
How DC statehood would work, briefly explained
HR 51, the Washington, DC, Admission Act, would create the state of Washington, DC, but instead of DC referring to “District of Columbia,” it would come to be known as Douglass Commonwealth, in honor of Frederick Douglass.
The bill states that the commonwealth wouldn’t encompass federal buildings and monuments including the White House, the Capitol, and the Supreme Court.
Now, in a party-line vote, Democrats have approved DC statehood, sending the bill to the Democratically controlled Senate — where even a party-line vote would still not be sufficient to send the legislation to President Joe Biden’s desk. And that itself isn’t guaranteed; according to reporting by POLITICO, not even all 50 Democratic Senators have signaled their support for the bill (the five outstanding are Sens. Angus King (I-VT), Joe Manchin (D-WV), Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), Mark Kelly (D-AZ), and Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH)).
The vote came just days after the White House put out an official statement of support for the bill, arguing “for far too long, the more than 700,000 people of Washington, D.C. have been deprived of full representation in the U.S. Congress.”
This is not the first time statehood has made it to the House floor. Just last year, House Democrats voted 232-180 in favor of statehood, making it “the first time in the nation’s history that either house of Congress approved legislation granting full statehood and congressional representation” to the District, Vox’s Ian Millhiser reported at the time.
But, the best chance yet still isn’t much of one: The bill — like last time — is likely to join countless others languishing under the might of the Senate filibuster.
While the debate over statehood has centered largely on how it would affect the political composition of Congress (92 percent of DC voters selected Biden in 2020), the district’s lack of statehood and limited control of local affairs has led to tangible policy harms for its residents — from being unable to enact locally popular health care policies to losing out on over $700 million in CARES Act relief funding last year.
“Most people, when they find out that their own nation’s capital [doesn’t] have the same rights they have — they’re ashamed,” the district’s non-voting delegate, Eleanor Norton Holmes, told Vox. “Ashamed to live in the only country which does not give the residents of their nation’s capital the same rights that everyone else in the country has. No American wants to have that distinction.”
That’s not exactly right. A Data for Progress poll conducted in February found that while a majority (54 percent) of voters agree with making DC a state, 35 percent of voters oppose it, including 56 percent of Republicans. In a March Rasmussen poll, only 29 percent of adults favored statehood with 55 percent against. FiveThirtyEight looked at both polls and noted that Data for Progress’s question primed voters to support statehood, and in the Rasmussen poll, the wording primed them to oppose it. That could indicate the majority of Americans don’t have a strong opinion on DC statehood one way or the other, so how pollsters frame the question matters a great deal.
What is DC losing out on without statehood?
Proponents of statehood point to several ways DC residents have lost out under the current paradigm — most recently, while trying to weather the pandemic.
“In the first Covid relief package we were shortchanged millions of dollars,” Stasha Rhodes, campaign manager of 51 for 51, an organization fighting for statehood, told Vox.
The $2 trillion CARES Act, which provided relief last March as Covid-19 began to ravage the nation, classified DC as a territory rather than a state. As such, instead of being granted the minimum of $1.25 billion guaranteed to each state, it would receive only $500 million, the Washington Post reported. DC has a larger population than both Vermont and Wyoming, which received $1.25 billion in aid, each.
“Arbitrary and out of the norm,” is how DC Vote’s Executive Director Bo Shuff described this classification. “It is typical in spending bills that we’re categorized as a state.”
It wasn’t until Congress passed the American Rescue Plan Act under President Joe Biden and a Democrat-controlled Senate that DC received the money it would have if it had been classified as a state originally.
Timothy Noah recently argued in the Atlantic that because DC isn’t a state, it is losing out on tens of thousands of vaccine doses that go to federal agencies within DC’s borders: “The upshot is that DC’s population-based vaccine allotment — 44,440 this week [week of March 29], the third-smallest allocation in the country, after Wyoming and Vermont — likely falls short by one-third to one-half,” Noah writes.
Covid-19 is only the tip of the iceberg, Shuff tells Vox. As Vox’s German Lopez has explained, DC has only had a sitting local government since 1973, when Congress passed the Home Rule Act. And even that amount of local control is somewhat constrained:
Prior to the Home Rule Act, Congress set DC’s laws. The Home Rule Act made it so the local government could approve its own laws, although only after 30 or 60 days of congressional review depending on the type of policy. Congress can also block DC’s laws through budgetary requirements.
Shuff said that congressional oversight has led to DC’s inability to legalize, tax, and regulate marijuana; the congressional prohibition against using local funds for abortion care for low-income women is also a sore subject.
“But the biggest one that stands out in my head goes all the way back to the ’80s and early ’90s when we were banned and prevented from implementing a needle exchange program to reduce HIV and AIDS transmission amongst intravenous drug users,” Shuff explained.
The ban was lifted, and Vox’s German Lopez reports the city “adopted a needle exchange program to combat its HIV epidemic [and] needle-caused HIV cases dropped by 80 percent, from 149 in 2007 to 30 in 2011, according [to] a report from the DC Department of Health.”
“So now we’re dealing with two instances where lack of statehood has killed Washingtonians,” Shuff said.
How DC statehood would work, briefly explained
HR 51, the Washington, DC, Admission Act, would create the state of Washington, DC, but instead of DC referring to “District of Columbia,” it would come to be known as Douglass Commonwealth, in honor of Frederick Douglass.
The bill states that the commonwealth wouldn’t encompass federal buildings and monuments including the White House, the Capitol, and the Supreme Court.
© New Columbia Vision, 2016 The red boundaries demarcate the boundaries of “Douglass Commonwealth,” and the white boundaries contain the federal buildings and monuments that would remain under federal jurisdiction. The blue is the Potomac River.
As a state, DC would then have two US senators, and a number of representatives in the US House commensurate to its population. And, like every other state, it would be able to pass laws in accordance with its legislative and executive bodies without undue interference from the federal government.
As Vox’s Ian Millhiser has reported, there are constitutional questions that Congress will need to address on the path to statehood: “The 23rd Amendment effectively grants three Electoral College votes to ‘the District constituting the seat of Government of the United States.’ Under this amendment, which was ratified in 1961, DC has as much say in presidential elections as the ‘least populous State.’”
While some conservatives have argued this means that DC cannot be admitted without a new constitutional amendment, Millhiser points out that since the district is still an entity (albeit a much smaller one), Congress can simply pass a law giving the district’s electoral votes to “whichever presidential candidate would otherwise win the Electoral College — or, even better, Congress could award these three votes to the national popular vote winner.”
But answering these technical questions is putting the cart before the horse. For now, the biggest obstacle to DC statehood is the US Senate.
As a state, DC would then have two US senators, and a number of representatives in the US House commensurate to its population. And, like every other state, it would be able to pass laws in accordance with its legislative and executive bodies without undue interference from the federal government.
As Vox’s Ian Millhiser has reported, there are constitutional questions that Congress will need to address on the path to statehood: “The 23rd Amendment effectively grants three Electoral College votes to ‘the District constituting the seat of Government of the United States.’ Under this amendment, which was ratified in 1961, DC has as much say in presidential elections as the ‘least populous State.’”
While some conservatives have argued this means that DC cannot be admitted without a new constitutional amendment, Millhiser points out that since the district is still an entity (albeit a much smaller one), Congress can simply pass a law giving the district’s electoral votes to “whichever presidential candidate would otherwise win the Electoral College — or, even better, Congress could award these three votes to the national popular vote winner.”
But answering these technical questions is putting the cart before the horse. For now, the biggest obstacle to DC statehood is the US Senate.
It’s a hard road ahead for proponents of DC statehood
Democrats’ narrow majority was able to pass statehood legislation when it came to the House floor but now it goes to the Senate — where bills go to die via filibuster.
Despite the myriad ways statehood would benefit DC residents, the political debate has been defined by the reality that two more Democratic senators would likely be added to the Senate if DC were to become the 51st state. According to the Brookings Institution, since 2000, the Democratic presidential nominee has captured, on average, over 89 percent of the vote in Washington, DC.
The political stakes of this were laid bare in 2009 when the Senate struck a deal to add a DC House seat in exchange for another House seat in a Republican part of Utah. The proposal died in the House.
As Alan Greenblatt has reported for Vox: “Republicans weren’t too happy [with this deal] either.” Jason Chaffetz, then a representative from Utah, complained, “This whole thing strikes me as political bribery. If Washington, DC, is due representation, make that case. ... Don’t try and dangle a carrot out there.”
Rep. James Comer (R-OK) who sits on the House Oversight Committee, argued this point at a hearing last week: “Let’s be very clear what HR 51 is all about. It’s all about creating two new Democrat US Senate seats.”
Rhodes, of 51 for 51, pushes back on this point: “I think most importantly, this fight is about democracy and the fact that all American citizens deserve participation in democracy. Our country takes a step back to talk about racism mostly in the context of policing and criminal justice, but we really want to ensure that we’re talking about racism that’s rooted in our democracy.”
51 for 51 is beginning an ad campaign targeting Democratic members of the Senate Rules Committee. The ads frame the issue as a racial justice and civil rights issue and ask viewers to call their senators to “prioritize DC statehood.”
That the fight is both a civil rights fight and a partisan fight would align with US history, whether lawmakers from either party want to acknowledge it or not. As Greenblatt notes, “political bribery is what the creation of states has all been about ... states have historically entered the union in pairs, with lawmakers using new states to maintain the balance of partisan power — or at least try to.”
With the filibuster in place, it’s not just all 50 Democrats who have to get on board; advocates will have to convince 10 Republican senators that the case for statehood trumps their current partisan incentives.
While progressive hopes for filibuster reform spiked with the victories of Georgia Democratic Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-WV) recent op-ed in the Washington Post threw cold water over these talks, stating baldly: “I will not vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster.”
The fight for statehood has been ongoing since the capital’s creation. In 1801, a prominent judge wrote in favor of representation, proposing that DC “be entitled to one Senator ... and to a number of members in the House of Representatives proportionate to its population.” Still, last year was the first time the measure passed in the House, showcasing the slow progress statehood advocates have made over the centuries.
“The most important thing is to see the progress we’ve made.” Holmes said. “It would make a real difference [for DC residents] to have two senators.”
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