Stephan: The District of Columbia whose population this year is 714,153, has a population that is just slightly smaller than the populations of North Dakota and Alaska, and larger than the populations of Vermont and Wyoming. Yet while those states all have two senators, and at least one representative in the House, D.C. has no voting representation. I lived in D.C. twice and like an overwhelming majority of Washingtonians found this lack of representation outrageous. It should have been made a state decades ago, and it now seems it may become one. As this story describes D.C. statehood has now passed in the House. Can it pass in the Senate? Biden will certainly sign the bill if it does. But it is a big if, in the Senate because of the Republican senators. However, I think it may finally happen, and that would be good news.
Aerial of the U.S. Capitol under restoration. The United States Capitol is the meeting place of the United States Congress, the legislature of the Federal government of the United States. Located in Washington, D.C., it sits atop Capitol Hill at the eastern end of the National Mall.
The House, in a party-line vote on Thursday, approved legislation to make Washington, D.C., the 51st state in the nation, sending the bill to the Senate.
It’s the second time the House has approved such legislation in two years, but the statehood bill, long a goal for the nation’s capital, faces an uphill climb in a Senate evenly divided between the two parties.
Winning a vote in the Senate would likely require ending the filibuster that requires most legislation to clear a 60-vote hurdle. Even then, not all 50 Democrats in the Senate back making D.C. a state.
The 216-208 House vote on H.R. 51, named to reflect that D.C. would become the nation’s 51st state, comes as Democrats have stepped up their efforts on a series of measures aimed at racial justice.
For decades, D.C. was a majority Black city; today, its population […]
