The House on Thursday is poised to pass a bill that would make Washington, D.C., the nation’s 51st state, a prospect that advocates call a long overdue equal rights milestone and critics decry as a naked political power grab.
The proposal, backed by President Joe Biden and leaders in both chambers of Congress, is expected to sail through the Democrat-led House. But it nevertheless faces daunting odds in the Senate, so long as the legislative filibuster remains in place.
Once considered a fringe cause pushed by area locals, the vast majority of Democratic lawmakers are now on the record in support of statehood for the nation’s capital, whose more than 700,000 residents do not enjoy full voting representation in the House and Senate. Thursday’s bill would create a new state with two senators and one representative.
“This taxation without representation and denial of self-governance is an affront to the democratic values on which our Nation was founded,” Biden’s Office of Management and Budget said Tuesday in an official statement of administration policy.
Advocates for statehood also frame the issue in terms of racial justice and civil rights. Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser, for instance, argued in a House hearing last month that the city’s historically large Black population factored into the denial of voting rights for its residents.
“Adding D.C. as a state should not be about politics,” House Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., said Wednesday.
“It is about equality and democracy, and Congress has a responsibility to ensure all Americans are given the full rights promised by the Constitution. Now is the time to right a historic wrong.”
The bill, sponsored by Washington Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, boasts 216 co-sponsors, all of whom are Democrats. The new state would encompass all of the District of Columbia, except for the strip of land on which the White House, the Capital building, the Supreme Court and the national mall are seated.
A prior version of the bill, H.R. 51, passed through the House in last year’s Congress, marking the first time that either chamber had approved a bid for Washington’s statehood. But that legislation stalled out in the Senate, led at the time by Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who refused to bring the bill to a vote.
In the wake of the 2020 election cycle, Democrats gained a razor-thin majority in the Senate. The body is now effectively split 50-50 between the two parties, with Vice President Kamala Harris wielding the tie-breaking vote.
But the filibuster, which requires 60 votes to pass most legislation, would likely thwart any attempt to pass the statehood bill in the Senate by a simple majority. Additionally, a handful of moderate Democratic senators, including Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema, have yet to signal that they would vote for H.R. 51.
The bill is also highly unlikely to find support from Republicans, who accuse Democrats of trying to ensconce themselves in power through political brute force.
Washington is one of the most liberal cities in the nation. If it became a state, Washington would add two reliably Democratic seats to the Senate, making it exponentially harder for the GOP to win back majority control.
With the face of the U.S. political map on the table, critics balk at Democrats’ insistence that their motivations are of principle and not politics.
“San Francisco will never vote Republican but will do so before D.C. does,” conservative columnist George Will wrote Wednesday in The Washington Post. “Does anyone believe that if D.C. were as incorrigibly Republican as it is Democratic, Democrats would favor D.C. statehood, which would mean two more Republican senators until the last trumpet shall sound?”
Many Republican lawmakers have voiced their opposition more bluntly.
Statehood “is nothing more than an unconstitutional power grab by Democrats to gain two ultra-progressive D.C Senate seats [and] enforce radical, far-left policies on the American people,” Rep. Guy Reschenthaler, R-Pa., said on the House floor.
Others have asserted that Washington’s small size and arguable lack of diverse industry disqualify it from statehood. Rep. Jody Hice, R-Ga., argued at last month’s hearing on the bill that D.C. “would be the only state, the only state, without an airport, without a car dealership, without a capital city, without a landfill.”
Democrats and fact-checkers pointed out the district does have car dealerships.
No Republican senators have indicated they would support making Washington a state. Some opponents of the statehood bill, however, have proposed an alternative in the form of retrocession, which would have the neighboring state of Maryland absorb most of Washington.
Democrats oppose that idea. Del. Norton said in February that retrocession “would be inconsistent” with Washington’s “pursuit of self-determination.”
“D.C. statehood does not require a constitutional amendment,” Norton added, responding to another complaint about the statehood bill. “Under the Constitution, Congress has the authority to admit new states, and every new state has been admitted by Congress.”
With Republicans dead-set on retaking Congress in 2022, and with the filibuster likely standing in the way of huge chunks of the Democratic agenda, a growing chorus within the party is calling for the 60-vote rule to be abolished or reformed.
“There are no provisions in the Constitution about a filibuster,” said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., in an interview Wednesday with the Washingtonian about the statehood bill.
“So, frankly, I think that filibuster rule ought to be eliminated in the United States so that democracy can prevail,” Hoyer said.
But West Virginia’s Manchin has vowed to oppose any efforts to scrap or weaken the filibuster, throwing a wrench in the works of Democrats eager to pass huge agenda items through Congress without any Republican votes.
