The debate over whether to grant statehood to the District of Columbia is a hotly partisan one with some cynical posturing on both sides. Democrats who favor the proposal say it’s all about giving the District’s 700,000-plus residents the same right to representation that other Americans have — knowing full well that a hypothetical new state of Washington, D.C., would certainly be sending two more Democrats to the Senate. But Republican opposition is grounded in the same self-serving calculations and would certainly be different if the District’s demographics were different.
What’s inarguable is that it’s intrinsically wrong in a democracy to deny congressional representation to a population that is larger than both Wyoming and Vermont. Congressional Democrats don’t want to hear this, but a reasonable compromise might be to fold the district’s residents into Maryland, from which the original district was carved in 1790 to create the capitol city.
The Founders designated the seat of government as a federal district, outside the authority of any state — and unrepresented in Congress or presidential elections. The 23rd Amendment, ratified in 1961, gave the District’s residents the right to vote in presidential elections, with three electors, the minimum number for any state. But in Congress, those citizens today still have no representation in the Senate and only a non-voting delegate in the House.
The Democrat-controlled House voted along party lines Thursday to make the District its own state — to be called the “State of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth,” in honor of abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Proponents of the change acknowledge that their goal is not only to bring representation to the District’s residents but to create a state that would have a higher percentage of Black residents than any other (about 46%) at a time when Republican politicians around the country are working to hamper voting by minorities and others who tend to vote Democratic.
WE HAVE little patience for the indignant howls of Republicans who say this is a blatant power grab. Like the GOP’s theft of a Supreme Court seat in 2016? Like the party’s enabling of former President Donald Trump’s corrosive big lie that incited the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol? Like the Republican voter-suppression movement happening right now across red-state America? Given the GOP’s scorched-earth tactics of recent years, no one should doubt that, were the District’s demographics reversed, Republicans would have rammed through a statehood bill at the first opportunity.
Still, what Democrats are attempting is a power grab. And it’s almost certainly not going to survive in the Senate. Once it doesn’t, Democrats who said this is about giving citizens full representation should honor that principle and seek a bipartisan plan to give the District’s residents citizenship in Maryland or across the Potomac River in Virginia. That wouldn’t be a boon for either party, but it would be a victory for representative democracy.
— St. Louis Post-Dispatch
