DC Deserves Statehood

On Monday, the White House activated the District of Columbia’s National Guard and federalized its police force. Donald Trump called the decision a “historic action” to “re-establish law and order.” In a remark reminiscent of the Supreme Court’s decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson that allowed cities to criminalize sleeping or camping on public property, Trump also threatened to jail the homeless if they didn’t leave the city.

DC’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, condemned the move:

We know that access to our democracy is tenuous. That is why you have heard me and many, many Washingtonians before me advocate for full statehood for the District of Columbia. We are American citizens. Our families go to war. We pay taxes, and we uphold the responsibilities of citizenship.

The Constitution’s Enclave Clause allowed Congress to establish a federal capital where it would “exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever.” But nothing was said about how the district’s residents would be represented, since seats in Congress and votes in the Electoral College are dispersed among states, not districts. Although the Twenty-Third Amendment fixed the Electoral College issue, and the Home Rule Act of 1973 allowed Washingtonians to elect a mayor and city council, DC still lacks voting members in Congress, and Congress can still review and override laws made by the city’s elected officials.

Simply put, the seven-hundred-thousand-plus residents of DC, the seat of so-called American democracy, still lack basic democratic rights. Trump’s takeover of Washington’s police force is adding insult to the injury of the United States’ long history of denying equal political standing to the capital’s residents.

This has been the case since the turn of the nineteenth century, when Congress moved into DC and passed the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1801, stripping residents of their voting rights. The outrage was intense, and the first congressional hearing to take up the representation question took place in 1803. But nothing happened.

Largely in response to the progress of Reconstruction, Congress abolished the city’s government in 1874. As Jacob Fenston explains, “White elites argued the city would be better off with no democracy at all rather than allowing Black residents to participate. . . . Three white men would run the city by themselves, being overseen by Congress, for the next 100 years.”

Throughout the twentieth century, the struggle for statehood in the increasingly black district was inextricably tied to the larger civil rights movement. In 1965, Martin Luther King Jr watched then president Lyndon Johnson sign the Voting Rights Act and then left to attend a march for DC home rule. Later, in 1976, protesters also took advantage of the festivities surrounding the two-hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence to call for DC voting rights.

But in a time-honored tactic masterfully documented by Robert Caro, opponents of racial equality took advantage of the bicameral legislative system — in which bills must pass not one, but two houses — to stifle statehood legislation. For nearly two decades, for instance, ardent segregationist John McMillan, chairman of the Council of the District of Columbia (a now-defunct position in the House of Representatives), single-handedly killed dozens of statehood bills by stranding them in his committee. (When McMillan was voted out in 1973, he took a Confederate soldier photo hanging over his door with him.)

Over the years, Congress has blocked DC needle-exchange programs — the only US city prohibited from using municipal revenue to support syringe access — and nixed health insurance coverage for domestic partnerships, including LGBTQ couples. During the COVID-19 pandemic, DC was given less aid money per capita than the states because it was classified as a territory. And during the Capitol riot on January 6, 2020, Mayor Bowser, lacking the authority of a state governor, was unable to call in the National Guard. It was Trump who finally called in the troops — after the rioting had stopped.

Since 1801, more than 150 constitutional amendments to give DC full voting representation in Congress have been proposed. None of them has made it through the Constitution’s uniquely onerous Article V process, in which two-thirds of both houses must pass an amendment, followed by ratification by three-fourths of state legislatures (thirty-eight of fifty states). In the past five years alone, the House has twice passed statehood bills, but both have died in the Senate.

Like with so many other issues, Republicans are using the Senate to block statehood, since it would almost certainly give Democrats two more senators and a House seat. But some Democrats have also been reluctant, such as when Joe Biden found it politically expedient to “flip a 180” on statehood in 2023.

In response to Trump’s order, many organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia (ALCU-DC) and the Metro DC chapter of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), have put forward statements demanding statehood and sovereignty for DC. Yet the difficulty of winning statehood so far points to the need for more fundamental changes to our political system.

Statehood legislation will continue to die in Congress regardless of what the majority of Americans and DC residents want. The same is true for police reform, voting rights protections, gun control, and much more. Congress’s structure — the gerrymandered House and the malapportioned Senate — is a permanent roadblock to majority rule.

The prospects for a constitutional amendment enshrining statehood are equally grim. Of the 12,000-plus amendment proposals since the Constitutional Convention, just thirty-three have gone to the states for ratification, and only twenty-seven have made it into the Constitution. And even if DC did become a state, it would of course be integrated into the larger undemocratic constitutional framework in which each state gets two senators regardless of population, the executive wields immense and unaccountable powers, and the unelected Supreme Court shreds what few hard-won rights still exist.

That means the demand for equal rights in DC needs to be part of a larger voting rights struggle that goes beyond our nation’s capital. It means a movement for an actually democratic constitution — one that abolishes the Senate, establishes equal suffrage and proportional representation, reins in the executive and judiciary, and grants full political rights to all US territories, from Puerto Rico to American Samoa. Universal and equal suffrage for all Americans means fighting for DC statehood as well as these more fundamental changes.