Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Boswer recently told Just the News that the Democrat-controlled Senate and House will vote to make the nation’s capital a state and send the bill to the desk of Joe Biden, who has previously voiced support for D.C. statehood.
“The nation’s capital, the federal enclave, continues to exist as the nation’s capital and everything outside of those new boundaries becomes the 51st state,” said Bowser. “Our congresswoman — we had our first successful vote on statehood in the House of Representatives last year. She reintroduced the bill. She has a record number of sponsors.”
She continued, “It is going to be reintroduced in the Senate in a couple of weeks, and we expect to have a favorable vote in the Senate as well, and then it goes to the president of the United States. We have made a big focus to President Biden to support D.C. statehood and make it part of his 100-day agenda.”
The mayor argued that because residents of D.C. pay taxes, they are entitled to two senators and a voting representative in the House.
“Just like you, we pay the same federal taxes as every citizen of the fifty states of the U.S. except we do not have two senators. We literally have no one to speak for us in the Senate. We have to have full representation,” Bowser said.
It’s little wonder why the Left is so adamant about making Washington, D.C., the nation’s 51st state. Given the demographics, all three of the lawmakers it would send to the U.S. Congress would be Democrats.
Not only would granting D.C. statehood be an obvious political ploy, it would go against the will of the American people. Two-thirds of Americans oppose making it a state.
The Constitution, moreover, explicitly states that the capital should not be a state.
Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution assigns to Congress power and responsibility to “exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States.”
The Constitution, then, establishes that the capital is not to be a state, but an area governed by Congress made up of land ceded from states.
Democrats’ plan for getting around the Constitution is to shrink the size of the official District of Columbia to a small area comprising the National Mall, White House, Capitol Hill, and a few other federal buildings. The rest of the city would be separate, and that would be turned into the state of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth.
It’s disingenuous for Democrats to say that D.C. residents don’t have representation. They already vote for president and have three electoral votes. Moreover, those who live in the capital can continue voting as residents of the states they came from, an option many choose.
If Democrats were sincerely more interested in giving D.C. dwellers representation than in scoring political advantage, they would instead advocate for retrocession, under which the capital would be shrunk, and everything beyond the main governmental area would be returned to the states the territory was taken from — not turned into its own state.
As The New American previously noted on the matter:
What Democrats miss in this argument is that the federal government is a creature of the states, not the other way around. The states created Congress, which is supposed to be a delegation of the sovereign states. There shouldn’t be American citizens who are not residents of a state. Such a practice runs contrary to state sovereignty (and is also why giving American citizenship to the people of American territories like Puerto Rico was a bad idea).
If Democrats pass and Joe Biden signs D.C. statehood, it would almost certainly be challenged in court, potentially leading to a Supreme Court showdown where the current makeup, which includes three Trump-appointed justices, might end up ruling against statehood.
As with Democrats’ attempt to impose “federal election standards” on states, thereby eroding state sovereignty, statehood for the capital is a cheap effort to get more Democrat Congressional votes that must be stopped to prevent a generational leftward swing in the federal government.
