Not a new idea, this. Dropping off the District of Columbia’s residential neighborhoods into Maryland, whence they came, has come up before—usually as a counter proposal to D.C. statehood, that political pipe dream Democrats can’t let go.
For David Krucoff, 50, it’s also a human rights issue. “With two more senators, sure to be Democrats, the Statehood solution continues to crowd out all other solutions despite its widely recognized political mortality,” reads Mr. Krucoff’s proposal for retroceded residential D.C.—what will become Douglass County, Maryland if he succeeds in his mission. “It turns out that the enemy to our equal representation is ourselves.”
Washington, D.C.’s insistence on an identity of its own is not just a partisan rallying cry for statehood or a constitutional requirement that the federal capital remain independent (although it is both those things), but a product of perverse pride in “second-class citizenship.” Get over it, Krucoff urges: He, a District-born real estate executive in Maryland, has surpassed the efforts of retrocessionists gone before. He has maps, a flag. And the most winning point of his plan: Rather than change our whole addresses, Douglass Country dwellers would still technically live in “D.C.” Washington, the District of Columbia would shrink to the capital’s “monumental core,” per the proposed borders. The rest of the city would bear Frederick Douglass’s name—an apt homage to the abolitionist, statesman and educator.
Maryland won’t go for it, members of Congress reminded Congressman Jason Chaffetz of Utah, chairman of the Committee on Government Oversight and Reform, when he brought retrocession back to Washingtonians’ attention late last month. “If you want full representation, I’m very sympathetic to that. I think there’s actually a way to do that,” Chaffetz said. “I really would love to explore the idea of retroceding the residential areas into Maryland so that not only do you have a member of Congress, but you have two senators a state legislature, a governor.”
If Annapolis were to welcome a “Douglass County,” they’d be sparing us from the clutches of a Republican congress. Chaffetz’s mention of residential D.C.’s retrocession to Maryland ironically riled representatives unhappy with the oversight committee’s plan to review the District’s local laws and spending. They’ve proposed reining in and overturning its more permissive policies on marijuana and assisted suicide, and passed a law blocking taxpayer funds for abortion.
Progressives who value these policies might rather be Marylanders than abide a Republican Congress wielding its constitutional authority over the capital—still, Chaffetz’s suggestion didn’t exactly play as a pragmatic compromise. (And it might not help what Krucoff calls a non-partisan cause that Chaffetz’s home-district town halls recently drew teeming protests, and national attention to their partisan rancor.)
D.C.’s non-voting representative, thirteen-term congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, was fruitlessly opposing Republicans’ review of the District’s home-ruled policies, which conflict with federal law, when Chaffetz mentioned retrocession. Norton predictably bristled at the idea (and, incidentally, did not respond to THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s request for comment). D.C. won “home rule” in 1973, and the right to elect its own mayor and legislators—since then, its political leaders have often thought the District should be 51st state, adding two reliable Democrats to the Senate. The dream of a city-state, more populous than Wyoming although plenty smaller than Rhode Island, is a politically-motivated dead end.
“When people in the District of Columbia say we’re giving up statehood becoming Douglass County, Maryland, I tell them you cannot give up something you don’t have,” David Krucoff kindly told TWS, over the phone from his Bahamian vacation. For the time being he’s focused on taking his idea to the city’s neighborhood commissions—and asking civic-minded Washingtonians to give up the ghost. (A grassroots campaign, he said, lays the groundwork for—eventually—a constitutional amendment.)
These volunteer city council members know a thing or two about struggling to solve problems neighbors have bickered over for decades. They’re right to be frustrated: Since D.C. gained electoral votes in 1961 and home rule in the 1970s, here’s been just the one dominant plan to advance Washingtonians’ representation, a recurrent request for statehood. And, since 1990, “[Congresswoman Norton] has sought that objective through one means the entire time, and the chances have diminished over her tenure.” Expecting a different result at this point, “It’s insanity.”
Statehood is a partisan obsession, particularly hard to shake. But Republicans’ congressional authority over local politics creates a values test for progressives: If denying second amendment rights and maintaining abortion funding, “sanctuary” policies, assisted suicide and lax narcotics regulations are so key to the modern progressive city, they should be worth more than the stale pipedream of a 51st city-state, what most want to call “New Columbia.” (By now, certain imperialist overtones probably make “Columbia” too problematic for many progressives’ comfort.) With a Republican Congress proposing tighter control of the capital—absorption into Maryland will seem a pragmatic solution for Washington’s liberal majority. They can get conservative Utahn Chaffetz, and his ilk, out of their hair for good. If the District doesn’t like being a politically football for Republicans, it might consider taking itself out of play.
Krucoff makes a more sentimental appeal for joining Maryland. Washingtonians deserve equal representation: “Second-class citizenship is not a point of pride. Don’t make it a point of pride any longer.”
Independence creates a sense of impermanence—rather than a punky pirate vibe, it’s a shifting and unreliable identity that depends variously on who’s in power and who’s in protest mode. It’s hard to feel continuously at home here (even for a Democrat, I’d imagine). Statelessness is an unhappy, well, state. Maryland less so.
Possibly the best writing on the subject of D.C.’s statelessness comes from Florence King’s Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady. She describes listening to radio game shows as a girl—”I listened to the wild applause that vibrated through its brocaded sound vents when a contestant named Texas as his home state. Texas always got the biggest hand, but any state seemed to arouse the audience; even Rhode Island got a big sympathy vote.” And recalls lamenting to her mother that if she were a contestant she, having been born in the District of Columbia, would get no cheers:
The retrocession of Arlington County in 1846 also had a good bit to do with preserving legal slavery, which invites statehood obsessives to draw a fretful comparison between modern day retrocession and the unsympathetic priorities of Old Dixie. Krucoff cites it as precedent for the creation of a Douglass County, but Douglass County—and not just by virtue of its name—would far better honor the descendents of Southern slaves who fled surrounding states for the District. And not least in that it really would give all residents equal representation under the law, meeting the original American promise more fully than forty years’ fruitless attempts at statehood.
