The renewed push for Washington, D.C., to become a state is couched in the language of enfranchising voters, but the primary objective is adding two safe Democratic Senate seats.
Since Washington was granted three electoral votes for the 1964 election, it has voted overwhelmingly for the Democratic candidate. The closest any Republican has come to winning the city was when Richard Nixon won 49 states in 1972. In his landslide victory, he barely topped 21% in D.C. Democrats have landed over 90% of the city’s voters in the last three presidential elections.
The Senate has been the target of Democrats since Mitch McConnell blocked Judge Merrick Garland from being appointed to the Supreme Court in 2016. Since then, Democrats have complained about the “undemocratic” Senate, and they’ve been even more frantic in their complaints as McConnell and President Trump have filled the courts with originalist judges. David Frum was willing to give up the game and say that D.C. statehood isn’t really about D.C., as was David Leonhardt from the New York Times.
The lopsidedness of the Senate looks likely to grow much worse between now and 2040, by which time less than one-third of the US population will control 70 seats in the Senate. This cannot endure, and won’t. Timely reforms can avert future radical disruptions.
2/2
— David Frum (@davidfrum) June 25, 2020
The Senate gives disproportionate power to small states, as everyone knows. These smaller states are overwhelmingly white: Wyoming, Vermont, the Dakotas, Montana, New Hampshire etc.
(2/n)
— David Leonhardt (@DLeonhardt) June 26, 2020
Having the two extra senators in 2018 would have allowed Democrats to vote down the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. In 2017, it would have allowed them to block Betsy DeVos, who has been one of the most effective members of the Trump administration. If Democrats were serious about the representation of D.C. residents, then the conversation would be about the retrocession of the city back to Maryland. Democrats know Republicans will resist D.C. statehood, and this compromise would solve the problem they claim they are fighting — but it’s the senators that Democrats really want.
In their desire to centralize government power, Democrats have our federalist system backward. Rather than view the country as a collection of states who delegate a few select powers to the federal government, they see states only as outposts for the federal government to delegate to. Therefore, you see a wealth of nonsensical arguments such as Frum’s about population numbers that are completely irrelevant to the point of the Senate and have been since the Constitution went into effect.
D.C. statehood isn’t about enfranchising voters. It’s a cynical play for power in an institution that they claim is illegitimate because it hasn’t given them power yet. This is the congressional version of the argument 2020 Democratic presidential candidates had for packing the Supreme Court, and it should be rejected out of hand.
