Caroline Brehman/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser speaks during a news conference on D.C. statehood in the Capitol in Washington, June 16, 2020.
Two Fridays from now, on June 26, the House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on a bill that would grant statehood to the District of Columbia. With overwhelming, and perhaps universal, Democratic support, the bill is sure to pass—at which point, of course, it will be instantly interred in Mitch McConnell’s Senate graveyard.
What’s surprising to me is that the House passage will mark the first time the bill has passed in either house. You might think that given the District’s long history as overwhelmingly Democratic and majority African American, such legislation would have been enacted for both partisan and civil rights reasons during the first two years of the Obama presidency, or the first two years of the Clinton presidency, or sometime during the Carter or even Lyndon Johnson presidencies—all times when Democrats also controlled both sides of the Capitol.
During some of those times, Southern Democrats would have joined with Republicans to block such bills, but by the time Obama entered the White House, there were precious few white Southern Democrats left on the Hill.
So we must confront the Ma nishtana question of Passover seders: Why is this session of Congress different from all previous sessions of Congress when it comes to D.C. statehood?
First, I suppose, withholding statehood from the District—and its right to have, by population, one voting House member and two voting senators—now can be clearly seen as one more instance of minority voting suppression, which has become the primary electoral strategy of the Republican Party and, therefore, one that all Democrats must oppose. Second, with the partisan gap between the two parties’ congressional delegations having widened to Pacific Ocean dimensions, adding the two Democrats that the District would be sure to elect to a closely divided Senate matters more now than it did in the past. (In the 2016 presidential election, 94 percent of D.C. voters cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton.)
Third, the importance of achieving statehood has been rising among D.C. residents. For decades, the District has been home to a Statehood Party, which has largely been a niche third party in District elections. (From 1977 through 1999, one of the at-large seats on the District’s city council was held by the Statehood Party’s Hilda Mason, an African American DSOC and then DSA member.) But D.C.’s power politics took place entirely within the Democratic Party, whose disparate members took some time to focus on the idea that statehood really matters—particularly in the past few weeks, as Donald Trump has been able to deploy troops in a way not open to him in the states.
The bottom line is that D.C. statehood, like so much else, depends on the outcome of the November election. It will require a Democratic Senate and a Joe Biden White House, on top of a Democratic House, to convey statehood to the District. There’s no small irony in the fact that the 2020 census is likely to show that the District is no longer majority-black—due to gentrification, to the move of middle-class African Americans to the suburbs, and to the flocking of many thousands of white millennials to the center of the nation’s politics. Be all that as it may, the enactment of D.C. statehood would still be a triumph for equal rights, in a time when the fight for even the most rudimentary equal rights is raging still.
