The House voted 232-180 on Friday to make Washington, D.C. a state. One Democrat, Rep. Collin Peterson from Minnesota, voted with Republicans to deny the 700,000 residents of the city he lives and works in the full rights of citizenship.
The bill was authored, as it has been over many years, by Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, who has served as the nonvoting delegate to the House from D.C. since 1991. In the debate on the bill, she talked about why it is so deeply personal to her and to thousands of other Washington, D.C. residents. She recounted the story of her great-grandfather, Richard Holmes, who escaped slavery from a plantation in Virginia. He “made it as far as D.C., a walk to freedom but not to equal citizenship,” she said. ”For three generations my family has been denied the rights other Americans take for granted.” She added that Congress has a choice: “It can continue to exercise undemocratic, autocratic authority over the 705,000 American citizens, treating them, in the words of Frederick Douglass, as ‘aliens, not citizens, but subjects.’ Or Congress can live up to this nation’s promise and ideals, end taxation without representation and pass” the statehood bill.