D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser on Friday called for a citywide vote in November on making the nation’s capital the 51st state, resurrecting a decades-old plan to thrust the issue before Congress and raise awareness across the country about District residents’ lack of full citizenship.
“I propose we take another bold step toward democracy in the District of Columbia,” Bowser (D) said at a breakfast attracting hundreds of city residents, Democratic members of Congress and civil rights leaders marking the 154th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation of slaves in the nation’s capital.
“It’s going to require that we send a bold message to the Congress and the rest of the country that we demand not only a vote in the House of Representatives,” she said. “We demand two senators — the full rights of citizenship in this great nation.”
The mayor’s announcement appeared poised to ratchet up tension between the District’s Democratic majority and its federal overseers in a Republican-controlled Congress.
The District is already challenging Congress over its authority to approve local city spending. This year, for the first time, Bowser and the D.C. Council plan to enact a local spending plan — totaling $13 billion — without congressional appropriation of those funds. Instead, the city will begin spending its money unless federal lawmakers act to stop it.
While some conservatives have expressed support for giving the District more control of its local tax dollars, Republicans have universally said statehood remains a non-starter. Statehood would give the District — which has never elected anyone other than a Democrat to citywide office in an open election — two Senate seats that could tip the balance of power in the chamber for years to come.
“I’m a big one for local control” of tax dollars, said Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), chairman of the subcommittee that handles D.C. affairs. But “when it becomes a slippery slope in an effort to give de facto statehood, that is not something that is going to be met with the same kind of genteel receptivity.”
Bowser left little doubt Friday that she sees the city’s fight for fiscal independence as a steppingstone to statehood. She announced her plan for a vote in November saying it will be critical to seize on whatever national attention and exposure might come from the city’s fiscal battle with Congress to make the larger case for statehood. And doing so in a presidential election year will put the issue front and center for the next president and Congress, she said.
The mayor’s administration is still in discussions with D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) about how that would work.
But largely, Bowser plans a push for statehood that would follow a process known as the “Tennessee model.” When Tennessee applied to become the 16th state, it was the first federal territory to do so, and Congress allowed for an abbreviated path to statehood.
Residents of the would-be state voted to ratify a constitution and pledged to begin a republic form of government. Congress then admitted Tennessee into the union in 1796 without requiring ratification by the existing states.
Source: The Washington Post | Aaron Davis
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