Washington, D.C., has more residents than the states of Wyoming or Vermont. Its residents pay more in taxes than do the residents of 22 other states. But what Washington doesn’t have is statehood and the political rights that go with that. And since it has to wait for lawmakers from the 50 states to say yes to statehood, the District has been waiting for a long time. Support is growing, though.
Wyoming and Vermont each get two senators and a representative. The nation’s capital gets a nonvoting representative, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton—and she has once again introduced a statehood bill in the House. That bill has a record 198 co-sponsors, while an identical Senate bill was introduced with 29 co-sponsors, including Sen. Mark Warner, who flipped from opposition to support.
The problem, of course, is that Republicans will fight with everything they have against allowing a heavily Democratic area to become the 51st state. Because everything is partisan for them, and depriving more than 700,000 people of a meaningful voice in the nation’s politics is a desired outcome if those people are Democrats.