Washington, D.C.: The battle over statehood
After years on the “political fringe,” said Mike DeBonis and Meagan Flynn in The Washington Post, the movement to make Washington, D.C., the 51st state is now at “the center of the national Democratic agenda.” More than 200 House members and 40 senators are co-sponsoring twin bills in their respective chambers to turn the district into a state—and President Biden recently threw his weight behind the idea. The proposal would reduce the size of the constitutionally mandated federal district to “a 2-square-mile enclave” that includes the White House, Capitol, Supreme Court, and National Mall, and make the remainder a new state called Washington, Douglass Commonwealth. Democrats should make this happen, said Jonathan Bernstein in Bloomberg .com. The measure would enfranchise some 700,000 voters—about half of them Black—who do not get congressional representation. It would also repair some of the unfairness of primarily white rural states wielding outsize influence in the Senate relative to their tiny populations.
“Washingtonians already have far too much power over ordinary Americans,” said David Harsanyi in NationalReview.com. The permanent political class who live there levy taxes on the rest of their fellow citizens and continually pass laws that strip power from states and centralize it in the hands of the federal government. Let’s face it: “The only reason Democrats want to turn D.C. into a city-state is because it guarantees them two seats in the Senate.” The creation of a new state is unnecessary, said WashingtonExaminer.com in an editorial. The residential area of the district was once a part of Maryland. If Democrats really want to give people in the district voting representation in Congress, that area should revert to Maryland.
The Republicans’ “pseudo-principled” arguments against statehood “are farcical,” said Jonathan Chait in NYMag.com. Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.) actually argued last week that D.C. “would be the only state in America without a car dealership, without a landfill.” Why would the absence of car dealers (D.C. actually has one) or buried trash “preclude representation in Congress?” Conservative scholar Zack Smith, meanwhile, insisted that the district residents already have political influence because members of Congress see their lawn signs on the way to work. Peel away the nonsense, and it’s clear there is no “principled reason” to deny D.C. statehood. Republican objections boil down to “simple partisanship.”