District of Columbia statehood movement
The District of Columbia, the federal district of the United States, has been the subject of political movements that advocate making it a U.S. state, to provide the district's residents with voting representation in the Congress and complete control over local affairs.
Since its establishment by the "District Clause" in Article I, Section 8, Clause 17 of the United States Constitution, the District of Columbia has been a federal district under the exclusive legislative jurisdiction of the United States Congress. It is currently debated whether the District of Columbia could be made a state by an act of Congress or whether it would require a constitutional amendment. Alternative proposals to statehood include the retrocession of the District of Columbia and voting rights reforms. If the District of Columbia were to become a U.S. state, it would be the 51st state overall, and first to be admitted to the union since 1959.
As a state, it would rank 49th by population as of 2020 ; first in population density as of 2020 ; 51st by area; 34th by GDP as of 2020; first by GDP per capita as of 2019 ; first in educational attainment in 2018 ; and 6th in terms of Human Development Index as of 2018.
For most of the modern statehood movement, the new state's name would have been the State of New Columbia, although the Washington, D.C., Admission Act passed by the United States House of Representatives in 2020 and 2021 refers to the proposed state as the State of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth in honor of George Washington and Frederick Douglass.
History
District Clause of the Constitution
In the late 18th century, several individuals believed that Congress needed control over the national capital. This belief resulted in the creation of a national capital, separate from any state, by the Constitution's District Clause, with a maximum area of .The "District Clause" in Article I, Section 8, Clause 17 of the United States Constitution states:
In support of the creation of the District of Columbia, Madison wrote in Federalist No. 43 that the residents of the new federal district "will have had their voice in the election of the government which is to exercise authority over them". Madison did not elaborate as to how this would be but even with a then unidentified parcel suggested that the principles of self-government would not be absent in the capital of the Republic.
Early discussions of voting rights
In 1788, the land on which the district was formed was ceded by Maryland. In 1790, Congress passed the Residence Act placing the district on the Potomac River between the Anacostia and Connogochegue with the exact location chosen by President George Washington. His selection was announced on January 24, 1791, and the Residence Act was amended to include land that Virginia had ceded in 1790. That land was returned to Virginia in 1847. The Congress did not officially move to the new federal capital until the first Monday in December 1800. During that time, the district was governed by a combination of a federally appointed board of commissioners, the state legislatures, and locally elected governments.Within a year of moving to the district, Congress passed the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1801 and incorporated the new federal district under its sole authority as permitted by the District Clause. Since the District of Columbia was no longer part of any state, the district's residents lost voting representation in Congress and the Electoral College and a voice in Constitutional Amendments and the right to home rule, facts that did not go without protest. In January 1801, a meeting of district citizens was held which resulted in a statement to Congress commenting that as a result of the impending Organic Act "we shall be completely disfranchised in respect to the national government, while we retain no security for participating in the formation of even the most minute local regulations by which we are to be affected. We shall be reduced to that deprecated condition of which we pathetically complained in our charges against Great Britain, of being taxed without representation."
Talk of suffrage for the District of Columbia began almost immediately, though it mostly focused on constitutional amendments and retrocession, not statehood. In 1801, Augustus Woodward, writing under the name Epaminondas, wrote a series of newspaper articles in the National Intelligencer proposing a constitutional amendment that would read, "The Territory of Columbia shall be entitled to one Senator in the Senate of the United States; and to a number of members in the House of Representatives proportionate to its population." Since then more than 150 constitutional amendments and bills have been introduced to provide representation to the District of Columbia, resulting in congressional hearings on more than twenty occasions, with the first of those hearings in 1803. At that time, resolutions were introduced by Congress to retrocede most of District of Columbia to Maryland. Citizens fearful that the seat of government be moved asked that D.C. be given a territorial government and an amendment to the Constitution for equal rights. But James Holland of North Carolina argued that creating a territorial government would leave citizens dissatisfied. He said, "the next step will be a request to be admitted as a member of the Union, and, if you pursue the practice relative to territories, you must, so soon as their numbers will authorize it, admit them into the Union."
Late 19th and early 20th centuries
The first proposal for congressional representation to get serious consideration came in 1888, but it would not be until 1921 that Congress would hold hearings on the subject. Those hearings resulted in the first bill, introduced by Sen. Wesley Livsey Jones, to be reported out of committee that would have addressed District representation. The bill would have enabled – though not required – Congress to treat residents of D.C. as though they were citizens of a state.Civil rights era and the Twenty-third Amendment, 1950s–1970s
Congressional members continued to propose amendments to address the District's lack of representation, with efforts picking up as part of the Civil rights movement in the late 1950s. This eventually resulted in the successful passage of the Twenty-third Amendment in 1961, which granted the district votes in the Electoral College in proportion to their size as if they were a state, but no more than the least populous state. D.C. citizens have exercised this right since the presidential election of 1964.With District citizens still denied full suffrage, members continued to propose bills to address congressional representation. Such bills made it out of committee in 1967 and 1972, to a House floor for a vote in 1976, and in 1978 resulted in the formal proposal of the District of Columbia Voting Rights Amendment. But that amendment expired in 1985, 22 ratifications short of the needed 38.
1980s–2015
Before the D.C. Voting Rights Amendment failed, but when passage seemed unlikely, District voters finally began to pursue statehood. In 1980, former Paulist priest and founder of the Community for Creative Non-Violence, J. Edward Guinan, put statehood on the ballot as an initiative. District voters approved the call of a constitutional convention to draft a proposed state constitution, just as U.S. territories had done prior to their admission as states. The convention was held from February through April 1982. The proposed constitution was ratified by District voters in 1982 for a new state to be called "New Columbia". In 1987, another state constitution was drafted, which again referred to the proposed state as New Columbia. Since the 98th Congress, more than a dozen statehood bills have been introduced, with two bills being reported out of the committee of jurisdictions. The second of these bills made it to the House floor in November 1993, for the only floor debate and vote on D.C. statehood. It was defeated in the House of Representatives by 277–153.Under the 1980 proposed state constitution, the district still selects members of a shadow congressional delegation, consisting of two shadow senators and a shadow representative, to lobby the Congress to grant statehood. Congress does not officially recognize these positions. Additionally, until May 2008, Congress prohibited the district from spending any funds on lobbying for voting representation or statehood.
Since the 1993 vote, bills to grant statehood to the district have been introduced in Congress each year but have not been brought to a vote. Following a 2012 statehood referendum in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, political commentators endorsed the idea of admitting both the District and Puerto Rico into the Union.
In July 2014, President Barack Obama became the second sitting president, after Bill Clinton in 1993, to endorse statehood for the District of Columbia. Asked about his opinion on statehood in a town-hall event, he said, "I'm in D.C., so I'm for it... Folks in D.C. pay taxes like everybody else... They contribute to the overall well-being of the country like everybody else. They should be represented like everybody else. And it's not as if Washington, D.C., is not big enough compared to other states. There has been a long movement to get D.C. statehood and I've been for it for quite some time. The politics of it end up being difficult to get it through Congress, but I think it's absolutely the right thing to do." D.C. residents now pay more in taxes than 22 states.
There were no congressional hearings on D.C. statehood for more than 20 years following the 1993 floor vote. But on September 15, 2014, the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs held a hearing on bill S. 132, which would have created a new state out of the current District of Columbia, similar to the 1993 bill.
On December 4, 2015, the District of Columbia was granted membership in the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization, an advocacy group for people groups and territories which do not receive full representation in the government of the state in which they reside.