Why the House Vote on DC Statehood was Long Overdue

Demonstrators in Washington, DC advocating for DC citizen’s rights and representation last month.

The House of Representatives voted on a historic bill to grant the District of Columbia full statehood this past Friday. Its passage marked the first time a DC statehood bill has passed through either chamber. While the historic bill is a welcome sign of progress to many Washingtonians for their voting rights and representation, it is unlikely to pass through the Senate or the desk of the President. 

Residents of Washington DC have been angling for full representation since they were granted the right to vote for President and Vice President in 1961. However the lack of representation has been a self-fulfilling cycle: the movement has struggled to gain traction in Congress because the District has no full representatives dedicated to its interests. Washington’s lone representation on the hill is a non-voting member of the House. The current representative, Eleanor Holmes-Norton, has fought tooth and nail for DC statehood in a battle that has long been polarizing. 

While at its core the issue is a matter of federal overreach and state’s rights, advocates for proper representation have struggled to gain broad support. Washington DC, affectionately nicknamed “Chocolate City” in the 1960s,, has a long and proud history of being a historically Black area. These demographics, in addition to the city’s political leanings (96% of voters sided against Trump in 2016), means that there is very little incentive for Republicans to support DC statehood as it would all but ensure another two Democratic Senators and one more in the house. Senator Tom Cotton (R-AK), voiced his concern of the bill claiming Democrats “want two new Democratic senators in perpetuity… they want to give the swamp as many senators as your state has.” He also insinuated that residents of Washington were less deserving of statehood due to the jobs they work, stating “Wyoming is smaller than Washington by population, but has three times as many workers in mining, logging, and construction, and ten times as many workers in manufacturing. In other words, Wyoming is a well-rounded working-class state.” While his thoughts on the matter were largely condemned as thinly veiled racism, aspects of his mindset are shared by members of both parties. Former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang said of DC, it “feels detached from the daily lives of most Americans,” and called for federal jobs to be moved outside the city. 

DC residents lack a representative and two senators, meaning they have never had an elected representative to vote on the confirmation of Supreme Court justices,  declarations of war, the passage of  federal budgets, or impeachment proceedings, despite the fact that they pay federal taxes. And, while Congress normally allows DC to pass legislation without too much pause, if a proposed law or budget is exceptionally partisan and there’s a Republican-held Congress (as DC is overwhelmingly Democratic), District laws often end up on the chopping board. 

This occurred with Initiative 71, a ballot initiative to legalize recreational cannabis, which was approved by 64.87% of district residents in 2014. In any state, the law would have passed without anyone batting an eye. But this was the District of Columbia, Republicans controlled the House at the time. A month later, to prevent a government shutdown, House Democrats and Republicans agreed to a spending bill to fund the federal government through to the next year. Tucked away in the 1,600 page spending bill was a “rider” - a provision that can be added to a bill despite being unrelated to the subject - which was crafted and added in by House Republicans to prevent DC from using its own local tax dollars to enact the initiative. Despite only one chamber of Congress being held by Republicans, Senate Democrats and then-President Obama had little choice but to accept the bill, rider and all, as voting against the rider would mean rejecting the entire spending bill and sending the country into a government shutdown. 

These restrictions have literal life or death implications.. In 1998, when needle exchange clinics were banned from using federal funding, states and municipalities were free to allocate their budgets to such projects - except in DC, where Congress banned Washington from using its own taxpayer dollars to support the clinics. Almost a decade later the ban was reversed and DC could begin to use its own revenue to support the reduction of diseases spread from intravenous drug use. In the years that followed, intravenous HIV diagnoses decreased by 87%, a sobering statistic when one considers the total number of HIV transmissions that could have been prevented in the decade that DC was barred from funding its own public health measure.

The solution to fixing these injustices now lies with the Senate, where the bill will likely fail. Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said last year that giving DC statehood would be, "full-bore socialism on the march in the House" and that “none of that stuff is going anywhere." Even if it were to be successful it would then certainly be vetoed by President Trump who, when asked about DC statehood in May responded, "Why? So we can have two more Democratic — Democrat senators and five more congressmen? No, thank you. That'll never happen." For DC residents, the road to escape taxation without representation will be long, but the bill is a step in the right direction.