I know, the whole D.C. statehood argument is as stale as, what, the ERA?
Who wants to talk about actual, equal rights?
But funny enough, the 200-year fight to get a vote for the People East of the Potomac did get a huge, historic push last week, when the House for the first time passed legislation that has a provision giving D.C. voting rights and self-government.
“There is no other way to describe it — this is historic,” said Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.). “After decades of struggle, the House of Representatives today endorsed D.C. statehood.”
Norton has been introducing bills like this for decades. But they went nowhere, even during the Obama years. So there’s reason to be excited that a governing body finally endorsed this.
The problem, of course, it that it’s going to stop dead in its tracks once it gets to the Senate.
This is not news to the people of D.C. We’ve voted overwhelmingly for statehood, and it has also gone nowhere.
We’ve had enough.
So I’m asking you, my state-inhabitant fellow Americans, you who get to elect voting lawmakers, who have a say in your federal government, you who have the power to turn a picture of an egg into a national issue, to listen to what’s going on here and be outraged.
Imagine a world where Texans aren’t allowed to eat barbecue, where Oregonians are banned from wearing beards, where New Yorkers aren’t allowed to honk.
That kind of horror is happening right here in Washington, where the politics-obsessed residents of the nation’s capital, the people who live and work in the shadow of the Capitol dome, can’t (really) vote.
Crazy, right?
It’s time for D.C. to become a state, and it’s time for the rest of America to support us. And not just because we have the trappings of statehood, like official statehood wines (from the 51st, including a lovely Statehood Syrah) and we get D.C. flag tattoos, and we (finally) have our own Home Depot and Costco. (Suburbs? Who needs the suburbs anymore?)
It’s a no-brainer because of the numbers.
The capital’s population hit a high mark last year at 702,455, the first time, according to the Census Bureau, that we had more than 700,000 residents since 1975.
Which means we have more residents than two states with voting members in Congress: Vermont and Wyoming.
How fair is that? We’re almost in Dred Scott territory here, according to the statehood advocacy group DC Vote, which reminds us that we’ve had other, dark times in our history when not all Americans were treated as full citizens.
I remember when then-Ohio Gov. John Kasich came to The Washington Post for a meeting with the editorial board in 2016 on a sunny day in April, before the presidential primary. There he was on a sidewalk right outside The Post as I headed out for a cup of coffee. He was shaking hands with the people of D.C., chatting them up, right after he made it clear why he doesn’t really see us as full citizens.
“What it really gets down to if you want to be honest is because they know that’s just more votes in the Democratic Party,” the Republican said during an interview with the Post editorial board, answering the question of why his party won’t support D.C. statehood.
Before it became nothing more than a political football, our current president’s favorite commander in chief, Andrew Jackson — a Democrat — had some thoughts on D.C. back in 1831.
“It was doubtless wise in the framers of our Constitution to place the people of this District under the jurisdiction of the General Government,” Jackson said. “But to accomplish the objects they had in view, it is not necessary that this people should be deprived of all the privileges of self-government. . . . I earnestly recommend the extension to them of every political right which their interests require and which may be compatible with the Constitution.”
Nixon was also in the camp of 51, back when D.C. had an even bigger population.
“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,” Nixon said in a message to Congress on April 28, 1969.
In 1976, the Republican Party’s platform said it supported “giving the District of Columbia voting representation in the United States Senate and House of Representatives.”
And get this. Before Donald Trump had a chance to see it through his presidential us-vs.-them arithmetic, he thought statehood was a good thing, too.
“I would like to do whatever is good for the District of Columbia because I love the people. You know, it’s funny. I’ve really gotten to know the people, the representatives, and the mayor, and everybody. They’re really special people,” he told Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press” in 2015. “They’re great. And they have a great feeling. So I would say whatever’s best for them, I’m for.”
There it is — I agree wholeheartedly with Trump on something. And I bet a few folks in D.C. would, too.
Twitter: @petulad
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