I have lived in Washington, DC for over ten years now. I work in, own a home in, pay taxes in, and am raising a child in this city. Not a day goes by when I am not confronted with the fact that my 700,000 neighbors have been purposefully disenfranchised for centuries. It is past time for DC to be granted statehood.
Five years ago, I (along with 86% of DC voters) voted yes on a ballot initiative asking the DC council to petition Congress for statehood. Yesterday, for only the second time in US history, the Senate held a hearing on DC statehood to consider the Washington D.C. Admission Act (S.51). It should be shocking to all Americans that we need a Congressional hearing to defend why our 700,000 votes are worthy of being counted.
DC admission as a state is a racial justice issue
As my colleague Taofik Oladipo stated earlier this year when the Senate version of this legislation was introduced, “Everyone deserves the right to participate in government and have a say in the laws that they live under. Unfortunately, this basic right has long been denied to residents of Washington, D.C. More than 700,000 people live in Washington D.C. under laws and policies set by a Congress in which they have no representation. That’s a violation of the fundamental meaning of democracy—and one that reinforces racial inequity, since nearly half the population of D.C. are Black.”
It’s bad enough that the lack of representation disenfranchises DC’s majority Black voters and reinforces racial inequity, but what’s truly sinister is that that disenfranchisement is intentional. You don’t need to be a historian to understand how DC statehood is a racial justice issue, but thankfully, scholars, legal experts, and historians have done a very good job illustrating it for the rest of us (See here, here, here, and here).
The minority witness, Robert Pilon, from Cato Institute testified in opposition to the bill yesterday using a half-baked constitutional argument to defend the think tank’s underlying policy position that DC’s majority non-white votes don’t deserve to be counted. [Remember that the Cato Institute was founded by Charles Koch and that the Koch brothers are financing state and federal efforts to increase voter suppression at all costs].
While the Republicans during yesterday’s hearing attempted to contain their honest opinions about why DC should continue to be disenfranchised, Senator Ron Johnson went almost as far to say that DC is too liberal and too educated to be counted as a state. This coded racist argument tracks with rhetoric from previous house hearings of DC being too corrupt, too violent, and its school system too broken to warrant federal representation. Since when have any of those factors been valid determinants of a person’s rights? What warped version of the Constitution are these members carrying around in their jacket pockets? In the view of legal scholar and yesterday’s testifying witness, Richard Primus from University of Michigan Law School, “the best understanding of the constitutional design suggests that admitting Douglass Commonwealth is not only permissible but desirable.” Primus, along with a group of the country’s top Constitutional law scholars, submitted an extensive analysis to the Senate committee supporting admission of DC as a state.
Denying DC voting rights puts lives at risk
Not having a vote does more than put a major damper on our election days. Disenfranchisement is inextricably linked to myriad inequities and disparities, ranging from housing to health. All you have to do is take a look at what happened when the COVID-19 pandemic hit DC to understand how it plays out.
As Mayor Bowser pointed out during the hearing, because DC is treated as a territory in decisions made about emergency funding, DC was shortchanged $755 million that should have expediently made its way to help people living and working in the city, hospitals and other health-serving institutions, and businesses. Black and other communities of color have been hit hardest by this pandemic and this disparity is especially stark in DC. And as the pandemic has ravaged the Black population in this city, it has reinforced inequities and disenfranchisement that have been felt for centuries.
We deserve to be fully part of our country’s democracy
DC residents deserve equal treatment and equal rights as our fellow Americans are afforded. As Marc Morial, President and CEO of the National Urban League, so eloquently wrote in his testimony yesterday, “the denial of all rights of American citizenship to residents of the District of Columbia that are enjoyed by every citizen who resides outside the District can no longer be tolerated and defended by a nation that advances democracy around the world.”
Despite yesterday’s embarrassing news of Senate Republicans blocking debate on the For the People Act, the fight must continue and we all must do our part. Lack of representation means that we don’t have Senators to help move legislation like S.51 forward, which is why we rely on others across the country, like you, to call their elected officials and urge them to vote yes on DC statehood. While you’re at it, you should tell them to support other critical bills needed to fix our democracy including the For the People Act, the Fair Representation Act, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.