Will Washington DC be America’s 51st state — and does it matter?

Should Washington DC become the 51st state? This seemingly arcane question has suddenly gained in urgency after the House of Representatives voted by 216 to 208 in favour of statehood for the District of Columbia. The President has the right of veto but Joe Biden is in favour. Given that the US Constitution allows for new states to be created by qualified majorities in both Houses of Congress, the only obstacle remaining is the Senate. 

There, however, the DC Admission Bill (often known as HR 51) is likely to die, given that the chamber is evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. To pass, HR 51 would need 60 votes: even if all 50 Democrats voted in favour, ten Republicans would have to cross the floor and defy their own party. That is not going to happen.

Yet this is an issue that will not go away. President Biden sees the lack of direct representation of the capital in Congress as “an affront to democracy” and a majority of DC’s 712,000 inhabitants agree with him. Yet the issue is not solely about democracy: residents of the District can already vote in presidential elections and their mayor is, to all intents and purposes, their governor. Congress itself is responsible for the capital, a privilege that many consider to outweigh the absence of other attributes of a state. 

The reason why House Democrats are so eager to grant statehood is simple: last year DC voted 92 per cent for Biden and, as a state, it would give his party two extra seats in the Senate — permanently tilting Congress, at present delicately balanced, in their favour. Republicans naturally tend to see HR 51 as a form of gerrymandering. Conservatives of both parties and none are viscerally opposed to giving even more power to the capital, regarding those who live “inside the beltway” as out of touch. They are, indeed, much wealthier than others: on average, residents of DC pay $37,000 a year each in federal taxes, more than twice as much as in Delaware, the next most affluent region. Almost everyone in DC works for the Government and hence has a vested interest in higher federal taxation and spending. Many Americans reckon DC has enough influence on the country already, but the liberals who dominate the Biden Administration see HR 51 as an enabling law that would make it possible to enact their agenda of radical reform.

But the issue is not just about Realpolitik. The Founding Fathers of the United States did not want a capital at all, and only reluctantly decided to build Washington a generation after they gained independence. Having seen the power exerted by London and Paris on British and French politics, they sought to limit the dangers of centralisation by including among the checks and balances of the Constitution a special status for the new capital. States’ rights have always been jealously guarded and bitterly fought over, from the Civil War to civil rights. It is no accident that Democrats want the new state to be renamed “Washington, Douglass Commonwealth”, after the black anti-slavery campaigner Frederick Douglass, who lived there for 17 years.

There are inconsistencies in the Democrats’ case for HR 51. The democratic claims of other US territories are even stronger, especially those of Puerto Rico. The Caribbean island was colonised by the US after the Spanish-American War of 1898 and has a population nearly five times as large as DC. Yet residents of Puerto Rico, even US citizens, cannot vote in presidential elections. The island is also poorer than anywhere on the US mainland; its neglect is a scandal, one that statehood would almost certainly ameliorate. Indeed, Puerto Ricans have voted for statehood three times in a decade.

Unlike DC, however, Puerto Rico is out of sight and out of mind. By turning the District into a tiny new state, with as many votes in Congress as California or Texas, the Democrats would in effect be betraying their progressive objections to the Constitution. After Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 with a minority of the popular vote but a majority of states, there was much talk among Democrats of reforming or even abolishing the Electoral College. The college, to which states send delegates who officially elect the President, was one of the most important checks and balances incorporated by the Founding Fathers into the Constitution. It was designed to limit democracy, by preventing big states from asserting their interests at the expense of smaller ones. Yet now the very same progressives who clamoured for the “antiquated” Constitution to be amended are proposing to give the well-heeled voters of the capital the additional privilege of one Representative (initially) and two Senators in Congress, plus three electors in the Electoral College. The fact that two existing states, Vermont and Wyoming, are even smaller in population does not alter the fact that if the DC Admission Bill became law, it would make the United States less rather than more democratic. 

For this “philosophical” reason, as well as the practical one that there is no majority for it in the Senate, it is probably no bad thing that this Bill will fail. There is no reason, however, why DC should not rename itself “Douglass Commonwealth” if the President and Congress so wish. A “commonwealth” (as Massachusetts, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Kentucky call themselves) does not have to enjoy the rights of a state. Such a symbolic gesture of anti-racism might irritate some, but would have the inestimable advantage that it would not unbalance the democratic system. The backlash that could result from turning Washington into a patrician city state might make even the most metropolitan progressives inside the beltway rue the day they ever tampered with the Constitution.

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