Statehood for Washington, D.C., will get a committee vote in the House of Representatives this week. According to Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the House Oversight and Reform Committee will mark up and vote on a statehood bill on Wednesday, paving the way for a vote of the full House as early as next week.
According to a recent poll from Data for Progress and Democracy for All 2021 Action, 54% of likely voters think Washington, D.C., should be a state. Republican members of Congress, however, are united in opposition. They prefer to keep taxation without representation going for 700,000 people, a number larger than in either Vermont or Wyoming, each of which have two senators.
The statehood bill would reduce the size of the federal district—the part not given the full rights of statehood—to the immediate surroundings of the White House, Capitol Hill, the Supreme Court, and the National Mall, and turn the rest of the current Washington, D.C., into the State of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth, honoring Frederick Douglass.
Republicans know their arguments are weak, like “The Founding Fathers never intended for Washington D.C. to be a state,” an argument courtesy of Sen. Mike Rounds, who represents South Dakota, a state created separate from North Dakota to give the Republican Party more senators. Or “They have no source of income,” from Rep. Ralph Norman, ignoring the fact that the District’s residents somehow pay more federal taxes than residents of most states—despite having “no source of income.”
The District’s government has noted several important ways that not being a state has hurt in recent months. On Jan. 6, as Trump-supporting insurgents attacked the U.S. Capitol, the order for the National Guard to activate had to come from the reluctant Trump White House and Defense Department, because the Washington, D.C. National Guard is not under local control. Additionally, “While our population is larger than that of both Vermont and Wyoming, under the CARES Act, the District was denied $755 million in emergency funds, which is the amount provided to the least populous state through the Coronavirus Relief Fund.”
Statehood for the plurality-Black District would help change the fact that, in the U.S., “The average Black American voting power is only 75 percent as much representation as the average white American in the Senate and a 55 percent to the Hispanic voter.” Republicans really don’t want to change that.
Because Republicans oppose statehood for partisan reasons, you’re often going to hear this presented as partisan on both sides. But the reality is that there’s simple justice issue here, and it’s a racial justice issue as well. More than 700,000 people in this country effectively have no representation because of where they live. This situation of taxation without representation is being upheld by the minority rule of the Senate, with Republicans able to block it despite representing tens of millions fewer people than Senate Democrats. It’s an insult to democracy upheld by an insult to democracy.