you should care about DC statehood

Intro: So you're a Democrat?

Look, as my mom would put it, my left arm twitches. If I don't call myself a Democrat, it's not because they're too liberal for me.

But that's not what this is about. Actually, I resent the hell out of the way people have made this all about whether or not you wish there were two more Democrats in the senate. That's a shit reason to make a state—wouldn't be the shittiest, but it still sucks.

What's a good reason to make a state, then?

Washington, DC is a polity of around 700,000 people (more people, for the record, than Vermont or Wyoming).^[1] Currently, it's a federal district: that means that most of our political rights come at the whim of the federal government. We've only been allowed to elect our own mayor since 1973,^[2] and Congress could change its mind at any moment. Meanwhile, even while we're ever so graciously allowed our little city council, the president can at any time decide to seize control of our police force.

This issue of heightened federal control is compounded by the fact that the people who live in DC do not have voting representation in Congress. I'm an American citizen, born and raised in America, and I didn't have a representative until I went to college.^[3] We couldn't even vote for the president until the 1964 election, after the ratification of the 23rd Amendment in 1961.^[4]

So at any time, the federal government can take away our claim to even the most modest say in our own local government, and our only recourse is (a) make really good use of our three whole Electoral College votes every four years or (b) move somewhere else.

What's the solution? Well, beg everyone else to give enough of a shit about us for us to become a state.

Why statehood?

It is the surest way to guarentee us the rights we are currently lacking, namely representation in our own federal government and the ability to build a local government that is only subject to the oversight of the federal government as much as our neighbors in Virginia and Maryland.

Why not retrocession to Maryland?^[5]

This solves the representation problem, but does have the issue that neither the people of DC nor the people of Maryland are in favor of it.

We're distinct polities. DC would become the largest city in Maryland by a pretty large margin (DC has around a hundred and fifty thousand people on Baltimore) and it would shift the balance of power in a state that's been a contained unit for a couple hundred years.

Honestly, I'd take retrocession over what we have now. But the people who propose it don't seem to be serious about it; they just want us to shut the fuck up about this whole statehood thing.

(Oh, and we can't retroceed to Virginia; they already took back their chunk so the port of Alexandria could keep selling their fellow humans as chattel.)^[6]

Can DC be trusted to govern itself?

It's not like we give out licenses for being a state. Like I personally think Florida's doing a pretty crap job of it, but we're not revoking their congressional representation or anything.

Honestly, this is simply a terrible way to decide whether people deserve civil rights. And, for the record, it's got its roots in some pretty heinous rhetoric:

...like the voting restrictions that southern states used to prevent Black men from voting after Reconstruction, these restrictions were specifically designed to suppress Black political power.

John Tyler Morgan, a former Confederate soldier who joined the U.S. Senate in 1877, was explicit about this intent. He said Congress had “to burn down the barn to get rid of the rats…the rats being the negro population and the barn being the government of the District of Columbia.”

— Becky Little, Why Isn’t Washington, D.C. a State?

What about the constitutional provisions for DC?

Look, do you actually care?

If so, there are actual answers (see heading "Statehood for Washington, DC is constitutional").

But I've had this argument with people in person, and when we get to this part, I'm always left with the sense that they're just...playing, that this is a fun dinner party conversation for them. I want to remind you that for me, it isn't. This is a question of my rights, and my parents', and those of my teachers from high school and the people who work at the sandwich shop I like. There are 700,000 of us, and we deserve exactly as much protection from and say in the federal government as the Constitution grants people in the rest of the country.