After sparking a backlash by dismissing the idea of statehood for Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico in a new interview with the Providence Journal, Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse quickly backtracked and announced his support for both proposals. It’s a welcome move that every Democratic member of Congress should embrace.
Every citizen in a democratic republic deserves the right to legislative representation and self-governance, and almost no other democratic country disenfranchises its own capital. D.C.'s population of almost 700,000 is already larger than Vermont’s and Wyoming’s, and the city is projected to reach 1 million residents in the coming decades. Most critically, the U.S. Senate gives white voters vastly outsized political power relative to voters of color, so admitting this predominantly black city as a state would help mitigate the chamber's huge racial bias.
Naysayers sometimes cite alleged constitutional obstacles to statehood, but reformers have proposed a simple solution, which D.C. voters overwhelmingly approved a 2016 referendum. This proposal would shrink the federal district down to a core of important government buildings surrounding the National Mall and White House and admit the bulk of D.C. as a new state. If Democrats regain Congress and win the presidency in 2020, they could then admit the new state of Washington, D.C. with just simple majorities by eliminating the filibuster, since the admission of new states is treated just like ordinary legislation.
(As an aside, the rump federal district would have a very small population that would, under the 23rd Amendment, still receive three votes in the Electoral College. But to avoid worries about any outsize influence this small electorate might have, Congress could easily assign those electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote.)
However, if skeptical Democrats don’t change their minds, D.C. residents will remain unjustly disenfranchised. The Senate, which only exists as a compromise because small states threatened to bolt the union, for ages has given Republicans an unfair structural advantage. Admitting D.C. to the union would mitigate this partisan unfairness, and for the sake of democracy, it’s simply the right thing to do.