Tucked among the anguished headlines in last week’s editions of the Washington Post was this poignant update: “In election’s wake, D.C. statehood becomes a dream deferred.” The quotation from Langston Hughes was no accident, of course: “Dream deferred” makes it clear that the Post regards statehood for the District of Columbia as a civil rights issue, and that the election of Donald Trump—and the retention of Republican control of Congress—can have only one meaning.
The issue, however, is a little more complicated than that. One of the stranger developments in politics, in recent months, has been the sudden resurgence of interest in statehood for Washington, D.C. Until Election Day, the mayor, Muriel Bowser, had made it a priority of her young administration—there had even been a mock constitutional convention to map the future—and the 2016 Democratic party platform declared that “restoring our democracy also means finally passing statehood for the District of Columbia.”
The problem is that the United States Constitution is fairly explicit about the status of what James Madison called the “federal district,” separate from any state and subject to strict congressional supervision. Article 1, Section 8, Clause 17 of the Constitution advises that “Congress shall have Power to . . . exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District . . . as may, by Cession of particular states, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States.”
In 1800, the aforementioned “cession” was carved from Maryland and Virginia, straddling the Potomac River, and in 1846, the southern portion of the District was returned to Virginia. But the plain fact is this: If Washington, D.C., were to become a state, it would require an amendment to the Constitution—and as Mayor Bowser and the Washington Post now realize, that isn’t going to happen any time soon.
Which is not to say that the status of the District of Columbia hasn’t evolved. Up until the mid-1960s, it really was governed, almost directly, by “District” committees of the House and Senate; but after 1967, and again in 1973, when limited home-rule legislation was enacted, Washington gained a measure of self-government, including an elected mayor, council, and school board, and a non-voting member of Congress. In 1978, an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress did pass a constitutional amendment granting the District a voting representative in Congress, and President Jimmy Carter supported it; but the states didn’t ratify it within the seven-year deadline.
And there, for the most part, the matter has rested. Of course, as long as there is a Republican party with any semblance of life in America, statehood for the nation’s capital is unlikely to be realized. Washington, D.C., is overwhelmingly Democratic—Hillary Clinton won 93 percent of the vote last week—and, among other things, statehood would add two new Democrats to the Senate. Moreover, District politicians have generally rejected attempts at compromise: Then-Rep. Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican, tried unsuccessfully to broker a deal to facilitate a voting member of Congress for Washington in exchange for a new congressional seat in Utah. And proposals for Maryland to repossess the square mileage where Washington, D.C., sits have always been rejected—by Maryland.
In The Scrapbook’s view, statehood is not just a pipe dream but a bad idea. The Constitution is clear about the status of the District of Columbia, and no taxpaying citizen—no teacher, no firefighter, not even the president—is required to reside there. One might also argue that instead of having a single nonvoting “delegate,” District residents are represented by every member of Congress.
Then there is the long-term question of precedent and the integrity of the union. If the mid-sized metropolis of Washington, D.C., is entitled to statehood, what about Chicago or Atlanta or Philadelphia? Southern and Northern California might well be tempted to split; Middle Tennessee is very different from East Tennessee; and Manhattanites might well contemplate what, if anything, they have in common with their fellow New Yorkers in Niagara Falls.
