(22 Jun 2021) FOR CLEAN VERSION SEE STORY NUMBER: 4331814
The latest incarnation of Washington D'C's long-simmering statehood push appears to be entering an end game as it moves to the U.S. Senate.
Barring an unexpected change in the political math, the initiative faces an unlikely future on the Senate floor. During a Tuesday Senate hearing, statehood proponents sounded like they were preparing a final stand.
"Our democracy is truly in the hands of this Senate," Mayor Muriel Bowser told the Senate committee on homeland security and government affairs. "We will not quit until we achieve full democracy. ... We will keep pushing until D.C.'s tragic disenfranchisement is rectified."
Tuesday's hearings on a landmark bill that would make Washington D.C., the 51st state featured familiar arguments on both sides. Democrats framed the matter as a long-overdue injustice being finally made right, while Republicans dismissed it as a cynical Democratic power play, claimed statehood was never the intention of the country's Founding Fathers and insisted that Congress doesn't even have the right to change D.C.'s status.
"What Congress cannot do is override the Constitution anytime it becomes inconvenient for a majority in Congress," said Missouri Republican Josh Hawley. "The Constitution endures and that is the fundamental premise of our Democratic republic, and I fear that premise is being threatened by this legislation."
The bill proposes creating a 51st state with one representative and two senators, while a tiny sliver of land including the White House, the U.S. Capitol and the National Mall would remain as a federal district. Instead of the District of Columbia, the new state would be known as Washington, Douglass Commonwealth — named after famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who lived in Washington from 1877 until his death in 1895.
The bill comes as the D.C. statehood movement is receiving unprecedented levels of popular and political support. It received a formal endorsement from the White House, which has called Washington's current status "an affront to the democratic values on which our Nation was founded."
The movement has also become intertwined with America's ascendant racial justice movement, with progressive activists framing it as an issue of civil rights and political enfranchisement. The proposed state would be approximately 46 percent Black.
An identical statehood bill passed the House in 2020, but died in the then-Republican-controlled Senate. Now, with the 2020 elections leaving Democrats controlling both chambers of Congress and the White House, statehood advocates had hoped for a different outcome.
This version passed the House in April by a 216-208 vote along strict party lines but the Senate is a long-shot. The Senate is split 50-50 with Vice President Kamala Harris as the tie-breaker.
Not long after the House vote, West Virginia Democratic and perennial swing-vote Sen. Joe Manchin essentially blunted whatever momentum that statehood had gathered by saying he opposed pursuing statehood via act of Congress. Even with Manchin's support the measure would have been vulnerable to a Republican filibuster. Barring a dramatic reversal by Manchin or unexpected defection by a Republican, the measure appears stalled. And moderate Republicans like Maine Sen. Susan Collins are already on the record saying they oppose D.C. Statehood in any form.
Bowser at the time quickly pointed out the ironies of Washington residents risking their lives to defend a Congress where they didn't have a vote.
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