The Independent View: D.C. Mayor Calls for Citywide Vote to Make Capital the 51st State

D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser on Friday called for a citywide vote in November to make the Nation’s Capital the 51st state, resurrecting a decades-old plan to put the issue before Congress and to raise awareness across the country about District residents’ lack of full citizenship. “I propose we take another bold step toward democracy in the District of Columbia,” Bowser told a breakfast of hundreds of city residents, Democratic members of Congress and civil rights leaders marking the city’s anniversary of emancipation from slavery. “It’s going to require that we send a bold message to the Congress and the rest of the country, that we demand not only a vote in the House of Representatives. We demand two senators — the full rights of citizenship in this great nation,” Bowser said.

The Mayor’s announcement could significantly increase tension between the city’s Democratic majority and a Republican-controlled Congress.

The District is already challenging Congress over its authority to approve local city spending. Bowser and the D.C. Council this year plan to proceed with enacting a local spending plan, totaling $13 billion, without Congressional appropriation for the first time since the nation’s founding.

Aides to Bowser said a broader push for statehood would follow a process known as the “Tennessee model.” When Tennessee was admitted to the union as the 16th State, it was a Federal territory, much like the Nation’s Capital. Congress agreed to allow Tennessee to become a State without ratification by the existing states. Instead, it required a vote of residents in the territory to approve a State Constitution and a pledge to form a republic-style Government.

Bowser’s administration has been working to update a Constitution approved by D.C. voters in 1982 for just such a State. That petition, submitted by then-Mayor Marion Barry, was ignored by Congress.

As Bowser spoke, hundreds of advocates for Statehood were amassing on Freedom Plaza for a demonstration, and Bowser said she believes the time is ripe for a new effort.

She said there is a universal injustice in Washington, in which residents’ “Zip code” cuts them off from having a say in Congress over how city residents’ Federal taxes are spent and whether the Nation should go to war or confirm a new Justice to the Supreme Court.

Bowser described a girl in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River. “When she prepares to vote when she turns 18, she will not have the right to vote for senator,” Bowser said. “But if she moved just one mile away, she would have representation and she would have two senators. But by living in D.C., those rights are stolen from her.”

The mayor called on the Nation to look at D.C. Statehood not as a partisan issue that could tilt the balance of power toward Democrats but as “an American issue.”

“Some in Congress say . . . the reason why D.C. residents can’t have full access to the franchise is because of too many Democrats,” Bowser said. “Can you believe that? Do you think access to democracy is a Democratic or Republican issue? No, it’s an American issue.”