“This week’s Memorial Day commemoration provides an appropriate opportunity for our residents to honor and appreciate those D.C. residents who have given their lives for the nation–without the rights of those who served in the same battalions,” said Holmes Norton, who sponsors the bill in the House. “Perhaps there is no better way to remember all District veterans than coming to the DC War Memorial, with the names of each of the 499 D.C. residents who lost their lives in World War I.”
According to Holmes Norton’s office, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform will host a hearing on H.R.51, also titled the Washington, D.C. Admission Act, on Wednesday, July 24. “This memorial has come to represent all of our residents who gave their lives in war, because none of them had the same rights as other Americans. Serving in every war, including the war that founded the United States of America, has not been enough,” she said. “Paying the highest federal taxes per capita that support our country has not been enough. The shame of being the only country that does not give residents of the nation’s capital the same rights as all others has not been enough.”
Holmes Norton added D.C. residents have had “enough,” of being “second-class” citizens. There are almost enough votes needed to pass the act, according to her announcement, and there are 46 national organizations endorsing the measure.
ACLU Points to Equal Representation, Self-government in Endorsement
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), along with its D.C. counterpart, endorsed the measure, which has been introduced in the Senate as S.631 by Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware. ACLU support for the act is premised on providing equal civic participation, self-government and full voting representation, according to the organization.
“Washington D.C. is one of the last colonies of the United States in the very seat of our federal government. It is deeply ironic that the people who reside in our nation’s capital, a symbol of American freedom and democracy throughout the world, lack full representation and self-government,” said Monica Hopkins, executive director for ACLU of the District of Columbia. “These rights are the foundation of our democracy. We hope all Americans will recognize this decades-old injustice and urge their members of Congress to support D.C. statehood.”
Statehood for Washington, D.C. would mean one congressional member and the obligatory two senators all states enjoy. According to information from the ACLU, the office of the mayor would be transformed via the legislation to the office of the governor, and the district’s council would turn into a legislative assembly. Its designation would be “the State of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth.”
“It is unimaginable that in 2019, the 700,000 residents of the nation’s capital are denied the full rights of citizenship,” said Sonia Gill, senior legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union in a statement. “Continuing to deny statehood and voting representation in Congress disenfranchises, by design, the tax-paying American citizens of the District of Columbia. We can no longer abide the denial of D.C’s rights in our representative democracy—the residents of the District deserve nothing less.”
There could be at least one obstacle the statehood movement will need to overcome, the Constitution, according to information from the Constitution Center. The Heritage Foundation issued a report from 1993 concluding such a measure would need a constitutional amendment.
“The Framers explicitly dictated that the nation’s capital was not to be within a state or a state itself. Article I, Section 8 gives Congress the ability to create a federal district to be the ‘seat of the Government of the United State’; in 1790, Congress passed the Residence Act, establishing a capital city within a 10-mile square area between Maryland and Virginia along the Potomac River,” reads the Constitution Center’s analysis.