Statehood for DC? Give the swamp back to Maryland

“The best, most realistic path to guaranteeing representation for the residents of D.C. includes returning the majority of the District of Columbia back to Maryland,” said FreedomWorks President Adam Brandon.

Photo courtesy FreedomWorks.

As part of its “We The People Week” targeting H.R. 1, the Democrat’s controversial election reform package, for defeat, they piggybacked in the anti-statehood campaign in hopes of drawing attention to both local and national efforts to join the city with Maryland as a potential solution.

The district was created from land offered by Maryland and Virginia, though Virginia got its land back. The founders created it as a “federal town,” and eventually, it won the right to govern most of itself.

Critics of the setup have demanded that citizens have the same representation in Congress as states, but their effort has never won.

The FreedomWorks campaign has already won some attention on Twitter.

Martin Austermuhle, with the local NPR station WAMU, tweeted, “In a practical sense, D.C. statehood is certainly complicated. What happens with the judiciary, currently funded by the feds, is one pressing question. But allowing D.C. to become a state is *much* easier on a practical level than retrocession would be.”

But Brandon argued, “D.C. residents deserve to have equal representation in Congress, but making D.C. a state is not the way to achieve this — in fact, doing so would be a blatant violation of the Constitution.”

Opposition to statehood has long been a part of the Republican platform because it’s likely that its two new senators and House member would be liberal Democrats, possibly creating a permanent Democratic majority in the two chambers.