(A version of this essay was published in the print edition of Roll Call on January 25, 2009. The version below was published at OpEdnews.com on January 17, 2009.)
When hundreds of thousands pour into Washington, DC next week to witness Barack Obama's landmark swearing-in, they'll see red and white yard signs up in windows, on front lawns, and along the city streets promoting the cause of DC statehood.
People across America are already somewhat aware that residents of the District of Columbia are denied many of the rights that all other American citizens enjoy, that some of the US Constitution doesn't apply to the 'federal enclave.' For those of us who live in the nation's capital, the District is America's 'last colony' and 'last plantation,' nicknames that have special resonance in a city whose population is mostly black.
Many of us see the January 20, 2009 inauguration of the first African American President of the United States as a chance to educate the rest of the country about one of the last unfulfilled goals of the civil rights struggle -- achieving self-determination, self-government, and full citizenship for people who live in the 'Capital of the Free World.' For most of the District's population, that means winning statehood.
It's also an opportunity to bring the message directly to the new president, who has expressed his sympathy with District residents and indicated he's ready to make some changes.
Under the District's current status, all laws, policies, and budgets are subject to the review of Congress, which holds the power to veto locally passed legislation and to impose laws that residents don't want. For example, Republican-controlled Congresses have outlawed needle exchange, which has surely led to the loss of many lives to HIV. (The prohibition was canceled when Democrats gained the upper hand in Congress in 2006.) In 1998, Congress overturned a ballot measure for medical marijuana (Initiative 59) that had passed with a 69% majority.
Congress has also imposed zero tolerance laws and a controversial charter school system, prohibited the District from taxing commuters (a source of revenue for all other cities), and demanded construction of a new convention center, to be paid for with a surtax on local businesses, a project that mostly benefited businesses outside the city. In 2001, Congress, through an appointed Financial Control Board, ordered former Mayor Anthony Williams to dismantle DC General Hospital, the District's lone full-service public health facility.
In 1997, Newt Gingrich called the District a 'laboratory' for Republican policies. Congress members have tried to overturn local gun control laws, enact the death penalty, impose a school voucher program, and deny benefits for same-sex couples. They failed to accomplish these goals, but if they had succeeded, District residents would have been powerless to reject them. In no state do Americans suffer such affronts to their right to democratic self-government.
Furthermore, District residents have no voting representation in Congress. While other Americans get to elect a Representative and two Senators, District residents have no say in our national legislature. During the past seven years, young men and women from Washington, DC have risked and lost their lives allegedly to bring democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq, in wars that no one representing them voted for or against.
Whether Democrats or Republicans have dominated Congress, we've seen a reluctance to grant District residents these basic rights. For Republicans, the reason is pretty clear -- in a city with over 75 percent registered in the Democratic Party, representation would no doubt increase the number of Democrats in both chambers. Why Democrats have mostly rejected DC statehood is less obvious, but it might have something to do with the influence of Congress members from suburban Virginia and Maryland who don't want to surrender their power to exploit the District for the advantage of their own constituents, blocking commuter taxes and enacting policies that economically drain the city and encourage sprawl.
It's also difficult to shed the suspicion that some members of Congress don't want a new Representative and two new Senators in their midst who will very likely be African American and will cast liberal and progressive votes. There have been no shortage of op-ed columns alleging that District voters, responsible for electing flawed and corrupt pols like former Mayor Marion Barry, simply aren't ready for hometown democracy. No one has declared the (mostly white) citizens of New York and Illinois unqualified for democracy because they elected Gov. Elliot Spitzer and Gov. Rod Blagojevich. With a few notable exceptions, including Mr. Obama, the Senate in particular has remained an Old White Men's Club.
In fact, Democratic politicians have retreated further from the goal of DC statehood, deleting it from the Democratic national platform in 2004 and keeping it out in 2008. The only party to endorse statehood in its national platform is the Green Party, represented locally by the DC Statehood Green Party. The latter, a product of the 1999 merger of the DC Green Party and the DC Statehood Party (founded by Julius Hobson, Josephine Butler, Hilda H. Mason, and other civil rights activists in 1970), has made winning statehood its chief priority.
DC Voting Rights or DC Statehood?
Instead of statehood, some of the District's most prominent politicians have campaigned for 'DC voting rights', a plan to create a single voting seat in the US House with no other change in the District's political status. The chief proponent of voting rights is Eleanor Holmes Norton, who already holds a nonvoting US House seat on behalf of the District. The proposed voting rights bill, formally titled the 'DC Fair and Equal House Voting Rights Act' (HR 328), has steadily gained bipartisan support. President-elect Obama has signaled that he will sign it if it passes in Congress. Ms. Norton, who has held the nonvoting seat since 1991 and is held in high esteem by many District voters, would almost certainly get the new voting seat.
Statehood supporters have found flaws and traps in the voting rights bill and have warned against confusing representation in Congress with self-government and full constitutional rights. "Don't be fooled -- the voting rights bill is a symbolic piece of legislation dressed up to look like democracy," says Gail Dixon, a Statehood Green Party member, former elected member of the DC School Board, and long-time statehood advocate.
On January 6, Senators Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Joe Lieberman (Ind.-Conn.) joined Ms. Norton in introducing the voting rights bill. The attraction for Republicans is that the bill balances the new seat for (Democratic) Washington, DC with a new seat for (Republican) Utah. But it would also give the GOP a slight edge in presidential elections, because the number of electors is tied to the number of US Representatives, and Republicans would thus win a new Electoral College vote. The District already has three Electoral College votes and won't gain a new one.
Furthermore, if it faces a lawsuit, the voting rights bill may be found unconstitutional. Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution provides voting representation in Congress solely to states. A decision by a US District Court in 2000 (Adams v. Clinton) held that "the Constitution does not contemplate that the District may serve as a state for purposes of the apportionment of congressional representatives." The Supreme Court reviewed the ruling and offered no challenge.
A report published on February 12, 2007, by the Congressional Research Service noted the bill's suspect constitutionality: "Although not beyond question, it would appear likely that the Congress does not have authority to grant voting representation in the House of Representatives to the District."
Or, to be more precise, the District probably cannot hold a voting seat unless Congress amends the Constitution (requiring ratification by two thirds of the states), makes the District part of Maryland or another state (this is called 'retrocession'), or grants statehood.
The voting rights bill contains a nonseverability clause, but a temporary injunction in the event of a law suit may allow Utah its new voting seat while the District vote would be blocked until a ruling is issued. It's likely that, should the bill fail, Congress will be discouraged from considering legislation expanding democratic rights for DC citizens for decades to come.
At best, voting rights is a temporary measure. In 1997, Congress passed and President Clinton signed the DC Revitalization Act, stripping District government of many powers and functions that had been granted in years past. Even if the voting rights bill were passed and enacted without a legal challenge, Congress would retain power to revoke the voting seat in the House and repeal the District's limited home rule, and may very well do so if a hostile Republican faction regains control in the future. If Washington, DC became a state, Congress wouldn't have any such authority, any more than it can take over the government of California or Connecticut. Except for Southern states after they rebelled, Congress has never rescinded any state's power to govern itself.
Some local democracy advocates have declined to endorse the voting rights bill because the bestowal of a single voting seat in Congress, compared to the three voting seats representing every American who lives in a state, turns District residents into 'one-third citizens.' The voting rights bill thus recalls the 1787 Three-Fifths Compromise that labeled slaves 'three-fifth citizens' for purposes of voting apportionment in Congress -- a stinging insult for a city with an African American majority.
And finally, the voting rights bill does little or nothing to solve the lack of self-government. Let us not forget that political self-determination and self-government, not representation in a legislature, are the true measures of democracy.
Throughout history, colonies in Africa and Asia and conquered European nations like Ireland held voting seats in the legislatures of nations that ruled over them, while they still suffered exploitation and oppression. Many of these colonies, like Algeria, a French possession until 1962, became free only after violent revolutions. Our own Founding Fathers and Mothers in the thirteen colonies fought for independence, not voting rights. Patrick Henry never said, "Give me a vote in Parliament or give me death."
In the same spirit, groups like the Stand Up! for Democracy in DC Coalition, the DC Statehood Green Party, and the new multi-partisan DC Statehood -- Yes We Can coalition have adopted "DC Statehood Now!" and "Free DC!" as rallying cries. DC Statehood -- Yes We Can has led the effort to place posters throughout the city in preparation for Inauguration Day. With the encouragement of Michael Brown, the District's 'Shadow Senator' (some prefer the appellation 'Statehood Senator'), supporters lined the streets with 8,000 signs by Monday, January 13.
How DC Will Become a State
If a court rules that a voting seat in the House for Washington, DC is only possible through a constitutional amendment, then statehood will be easier to achieve, since it won't require ratification by the two-thirds of states necessary for an amendment.
In 1846, an Act of Congress removed Arlington from the District and ceded it to Virginia, demonstrating that, by simple majority, Congress may alter the borders of the constitutionally mandated federal enclave. Congress may therefore reduce the borders again, this time to encompass only the federal properties (the Mall, the land occupied by the White House, etc.), freeing the rest of the District to choose statehood in a plebescite vote.
Washington, DC (or whatever new name is chosen for the new state) would then be admitted to the union by a second simple-majority vote in Congress, as were all other states after the thirteen original colonies.
Arguments have been made for retrocession to Maryland, but both Maryland and District residents have mostly rejected the idea. Marylanders see Washington as a potential economic drain on their state, while District residents have traditionally favored statehood and balked at absorption into an existing state.
What will the new state look like? Its citizens will get their two Senators and one Representative as well as freedom from Congress's authority. We'll have our first state with an African American majority. Americans all over the US who live in cities, and who are now underrepresented in Congress -- especially in the Senate, since voters from suburban and rural areas tend to prevail in Senatorial elections -- will have permanent voices in both chambers speaking for their interests.
Two years ago, the DC Statehood Green Party and Stand Up! for Democracy in DC Coalition drafted a petition for DC statehood to be sent to the United Nations Committee on Human Rights and the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which monitor compliance with treaties that the US has signed and ratified. In 2006, the Human Rights Committee found that the District's lack of voting representation in Congress violated the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The ruling was the result of a decade of work by democracy advocate Tim Cooper.
DC statehood is attainable, but only if District residents can enlist the solidarity of Americans everywhere. The Obama inauguration will be an opportunity to place the argument for statehood in the national spotlight and persuade visitors enjoying Washington, DC hospitality that, as Gail Dixon has said, democracy for the District "is one of the last major legal civil rights hurdles."
Visitors, along with those watching the event on television and online, can follow up by doing what no resident of Washington, DC can. They can call up their Senators and Representatives and tell them that DC statehood is the right thing to do. Nearly 233 years after the Declaration of Independence, about 143 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and 45 years after the Civil Rights Act, democracy for the District of Columbia is a matter of overdue justice.
For more information about the movement for DC statehood, visit the following sites:
The DC Statehood Papers: Writings on DC Statehood & self-government, by Sam Smith
The DC Statehood Green Party
Stand Up! for Democracy in DC Coalition
DC Statehood -- Yes We Can
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