House committee votes to approve DC statehood as Democrats denounce the disenfranchisement of DC’s 700,000 residents

• The House Oversight and Reform Committee approved a bill that would make Washington, DC, the country's 51st state.
• H.R. 51 is expected to pass a full House vote along party lines next week.
• But the legislation is almost certainly doomed in the Senate, where it would need 60 votes to pass.
• See more stories on Insider's business page.

The House Oversight and Reform Committee approved a bill on Wednesday that would make Washington, DC, the country's 51st state.

The Washington, DC Admissions Act or H.R. 51, introduced by DC Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, is expected to pass a full House vote along party lines next week.

Those in favor of statehood argue that DC residents are being denied their most basic democratic right to representation in Congress. The city has one non-voting member of the House and two "shadow senators," who are unelected and can't vote.

"The United States is the only democratic country that denies both voting rights in the national legislature and local self-government to the people of its capital and that is wrong. It violates everything we stand for as Americans," the Oversight Committee chairwoman, Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, said during Wednesday's committee hearing.

Congress passed the same legislation last June, but the Republican-controlled Senate refused to bring it up for a vote last year. While Democrats now control the House, Senate, and White House, the bill likely remains doomed as its passage would require 60 votes in the Senate because of the chamber's filibuster rule. Just 44 Democratic senators have co-sponsored the legislation.

But Democrats hope to capitalize on their new power in Washington - and years of intensifying grassroots advocacy - to push the issue to the center of national politics.

President Joe Biden supports the statehood effort and the White House reiterated on Wednesday that the president would be "happy" to sign H.R. 51 into law.

Growing calls for statehood

The issue of DC statehood has been percolating for decades - Washingtonians have for years driven around with "Taxation Without Representation" on their license plates - but it recently found new energy both on the local and national levels.

In 1964, Congress passed the 23rd Amendment, which gave the District 3 Electoral College votes in presidential elections. In 1974, the city elected its first-ever mayor. Last June, the House voted in support of statehood for the first time ever.

DC has a larger population than both Vermont and Wyoming. And DC residents pay higher federal taxes than nearly half of US states.

DC's lack of power came to the fore earlier this year when DC Mayor Muriel Bowser condemned the federal government's response to the January 6 Capitol siege and argued that she was powerless to help keep the city safe in part because, unlike state governors, she's unable to activate the National Guard without federal permission.

National public opinion on DC statehood is split. But recent polling has shown a slight uptick in support for the effort in the wake of the Capitol Siege. DC residents themselves are overwhelmingly in favor of becoming the 51st state - 86% of voters supported a 2016 referendum on statehood.

Republican arguments against DC statehood

Republicans have a few arguments against statehood, including that H.R. 51 is unconstitutional and that it's a Democratic power grab.

The top Republican on the Oversight Committee, Kentucky Rep. James Comer, argued that the legislation is "flatly unconstitutional" and that DC statehood would require a constitutional amendment. But he primarily leaned on the GOP's case that the push is largely motivated by Democrats' desire to expand their political power in Congress.

"It's all about creating two new Democrat US Senate seats," Comer said. "This bill is part of the progressive pathway that President Biden, Leader Schumer, and Speaker Pelosi have to reshape America into that socialist utopia that the Squad talks about."

Republicans have also advanced more far-fetched arguments, including that DC simply doesn't have the infrastructure to become a state.

"DC would be the only state - the only state - without an airport, without a car dealership, without a capital city, without a landfill, without even a name of its own, and we can go on and on and on," Rep. Jody Hice, a Georgia Republican, argued last month.

DC has multiple car dealerships and provides Metro train service to one airport just across the river in Virginia and is less than an hour from two other airports.

But the debate over DC statehood hasn't always been so politically polarized. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the Republican Party supported congressional representation for the city.

"It should offend the democratic sense of this nation that the 850,000 citizens of its Capitol, comprising a population larger than 11 of its states, have no voice in the Congress," President Richard Nixon told Congress in 1969.

The mood had shifted by the '90s when more than 100 Democratic members of Congress voted against statehood in 1993, which was the last time the issue came before Congress prior to last year.

DC statehood as a racial justice issue

Nearly half of DC's more than 700,000 residents are Black. If the city were to become a state, it would be the only state in the nation with a plurality of Black residents.

Democrats argue that Republican opposition to DC statehood is in part motivated by a broader right-wing campaign to disenfranchise Black and brown voters, who are disproportionately Democrats.

During Wednesday's hearing, Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat, called Republicans' "crocodile tears about constitutional doubts" a "subterfuge" for Republicans' desire "to make it harder for people of color to vote."

"This is 200 years late, but better late than never to try to right a wrong, to try to enfranchise 700,000-plus fellow Americans, who shed their blood in our battles and wars, who pay more than their fair share of taxes, who live here and are Americans, but are denied voting representation in the Congress," Connolly said.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez argued that is it particularly unjust to deny Black residents of DC full representation given that the city was the first federally recognized municipality in America to abolish slavery.

"To deny the statehood of the District of Columbia is to deny the impact of slavery in America," Ocasio-Cortez said during a June 2020 hearing.

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