House to vote on making DC the 51st state, but GOP opposition means bill unlikely to advance further
WASHINGTON – The Democratic-led House of Representatives will take a decisive step toward making Washington, D.C., the 51st state Friday, though Republicans and the White House have voiced their opposition to the measure.
The Washington, D.C. Admission Act bill, aptly named “H.R. 51,” would allow for the admission of a new state, called Washington, Douglass Commonwealth, which would be represented by two senators and one member of Congress. The new state would be named for abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who spent the last 17 years of his life in the district.
The state’s territory would include all of the district’s current territory, except for monuments and federal buildings such as the White House and Capitol building.
Calls for DC statehood have grown louder since protests erupted across the city in the wake of George Floyd’s death. Mayor Muriel Bowser has advocated for statehood as a way to exert the district’s control over its own policing matters.
At a Thursday press conference, she noted the president “moved the Army to address a local policing matter” and “the only way to address that is through statehood.”
Washington, D.C. leaders had heavily criticized the use of soldiers to respond to protests in the city. National Guard soldiers were activated to respond to the protests in Washington, D.C., and active-duty soldiers were mobilized outside the district but never deployed.
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The bill’s likely passage in the House will mark the first time a Washington statehood bill would pass in either chamber of Congress. A statehood bill came up for a vote in 1993, but failed in the House.
Regardless of the outcome of Friday’s vote, the bill, is unlikely to advance further. If approved, it would move to the Republican-led Senate, where Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has voiced opposition to the measure. No Republicans cosponsor the House’s statehood bill.
President Donald Trump said in a May interview with the New York Post it would be “very, very stupid” for Republicans to allow Washington to become a state, and his administration has said Trump would veto it.
“They plan to make the District of Columbia a state—that’d give them two new Democratic senators—Puerto Rico a state, that would give them two more new Democratic senators,” McConnell said in an interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingrahm last year. “So this is full bore socialism on the march in the House. And yeah, as long as I’m the majority leader of the Senate, none of that stuff is going anywhere.”
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What’s the argument for statehood?
Advocates of statehood say it’s a long-overdue change for a city that lacks any voting representation in Congress.
NAACP President Derrick Johnson told USA TODAY in a phone interview it was an issue of “fairness” for the city’s population.
“This has been a question that’s been pushed for over 50 years,” he said, even when the district was a majority-Black city. “This goes beyond just race. This goes to the fundamental issue of fair representation for all citizens of the United States.”
Census Bureau data shows that 46.4% of the district’s population is African American, 11.3% is Hispanic or Latino and 4.4% is Asian, and the district’s population is larger than Wyoming and Vermont.
In a Thursday speech in support of the legislation, the district’s sole nonvoting member of Congress, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, said the lack of voting representation in Congress meant that despite paying federal taxes, the district’s residents “were excluded entirely from American democracy for most of its existence as the capital.”
President Barack Obama said in 2014 that he supported D.C. statehood, putting the district’s “Taxation Without Representation” license plates on the presidential limousine.
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There is support for statehood outside the district, too. National Democratic leaders voiced their support for D.C. statehood in a Twitter thread Thursday, with former Vice President Joe Biden, former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Kamala Harris, and others tweeting “DC should be a state. Pass it on.”
What’s the argument against statehood?
Republicans say giving the district statehood would give too much power to the capital and would cause constitutional issues.
The Trump administration’s announcement of its planned veto for the bill called statehood “unconstitutional” because of the logistical problems in carving out land for the state and allotting it congressional representation.
The new state would “achieve outsized authority in some respects as compared to the other 50 States,” they wrote.
Trump has also objected to the prospect of D.C. statehood because it would likely mean the District would elect Democratic members of Congress. The district’s voters chose Hillary Clinton by an overwhelming margin in 2016, and Norton, the District’s Democratic member of Congress, has served since 1991.
“D.C. will never be a state,” Trump told the New York Post. “You mean District of Columbia, a state? Why? So we can have two more Democratic — Democrat senators and five more congressmen? No thank you. That’ll never happen.”
The Senate currently is split 53-47, the majority held by Republicans, and adding two D.C. senators would cut into the GOP advantage in the chamber.
The Constitution gives Congress the ability to set its own conditions for admitting a state, but is vague on the subject of Washington.
Under the Admission Clause, “New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union,” and Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution allows Congress to create a “District (not exceeding ten miles square)” to become the seat of government.
Initially, Congress was given complete control over the district’s legislation out of fears that a single state could wield too much power over the federal government. Later acts of Congress granted greater self-rule to the district, and the 23rd Amendment gave residents the ability to vote in presidential contests.