#hr51

Kevin Frekling at AP, via HuffPost: 

WASHINGTON (AP) — A long-shot bid to pass legislation that would make the District of Columbia the nation’s 51st state got a little longer on Friday.

Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia said that he opposes unilateral action by Congress to make the nation’s capital a state and that he believes it needs to be done through a constitutional amendment. He said prior Republican and Democratic administrations thought the same thing.

“They all came to the same conclusion. If Congress wants to make D.C. a state, it should propose a constitutional amendment,” Manchin said in an interview with the West Virginia MetroNews radio network. “It should propose a constitutional amendment and let the people of America vote.”

Earlier this month, the House approved a bill strictly along party lines to make the District of Columbia a state with one representative and two senators, while a tiny sliver of land including the White House, the U.S. Capitol and the National Mall would remain a federal district.

An identical statehood bill passed the House in 2020, but it died in the then-Republican-controlled Senate. Now, with the 2020 elections having given Democrats control of both chambers of Congress and the White House, some have been pushing to eliminate the filibuster so that only a simple majority in the Senate would be needed to get legislation passed. The D.C. statehood bid would be one of the initiatives that could conceivably pass under such a scenario.

Still, such a tactic would require total Democratic unity, and Friday’s radio interview with Manchin demonstrated anew that they don’t have it.

Manchin has also stated unequivocally that he will not vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster. He is among a handful of Democratic senators who have not openly supported the D.C. statehood initiative.

Travis Waldron and Paul Blumenthal at HuffPost:

The House of Representatives on Thursday approved legislation that would make Washington, D.C., the country’s 51st state, a move that would grant residents of the nation’s capital full voting rights and representation in Congress.

The bill, H.R. 51, passed along party lines. The vote will bring D.C. closer to statehood than it has been in at least three decades.

“We right a historic injustice by passing legislation to finally grant the District of Columbia statehood,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said from the House floor.

This is the second time in two years that the House voted to make D.C. a state. But in 2020, Republican control of the Senate and White House prevented final passage. Democrats now control the Senate, and President Joe Biden’s administration announced its official support of the legislation earlier this week, throwing the weight of the White House behind the effort in a way no president has before.

“For far too long, the more than 700,000 people of Washington, D.C. have been deprived of full representation in the U.S. Congress,” the administration said in an official statement of its policy position. “This taxation without representation and denial of self-governance is an affront to the democratic values on which our Nation was founded.”

The effort now moves to the Senate, where it faces longer odds of approval. Forty-five Democratic senators have signed on to the chamber’s version of the bill; New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, one of five Democrats yet to do so, has co-sponsored similar legislation in the past. The others — centrist Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.), Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.), Mark Kelly (Ariz.) and Angus King (I-Maine) — have not taken public positions on the issue.

The filibuster, a procedural hurdle that requires 60 votes to clear, could derail the statehood push even if it garners support from all 50 Democrats. But Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D), D.C.’s non-voting congressional representative, told HuffPost on Thursday that she believed the statehood bill would pass — either because Democrats ultimately choose to do away with the filibuster entirely, or because they alter Senate rules to allow statehood bills to be approved by a bare majority.

[...]

Republicans broadly oppose D.C. statehood, primarily because it would almost certainly assure the election of two additional Democrats to the Senate, potentially tipping the political balance of a body that is currently evenly split between the two parties. As former president Donald Trump said before House passage of the 2020 statehood bill: “District of Columbia, a state? Why? So we can have two more Democratic ― Democrat senators and five more congressmen? No thank you. That’ll never happen.” (D.C. would have one member of the House if it were admitted as a state, not five.)

Washingtonians pay taxes, more per capita than any State. They fight in wars, sacrifice their lives for their country.They are denied a representative with a vote in the halls of Congress. As an outsider looking in, this is not only hypocritical but amoral.

The country that fought for independence because of taxation without representation is doing that to the people who live in the Capital. If you think they don't deserve it, shame on you.

Laura Clawson at Daily Kos: 

A major pro-democracy bill is getting a hearing from the House Oversight Committee Monday: statehood for Washington, D.C. A statehood bill passed the House last year, and it has unprecedented support in the Senate—though, of course, Republicans can and will still use the filibuster to block it as long as the filibuster remains in its current form.

Why should we call statehood a major issue for democracy? Because we’re talking about giving 700,000 people representation in our government. “All we're looking for is equality with other Americans, especially since we pay the highest federal taxes per capita in the United States,” Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s non-voting representative to Congress, explains.

Washington, D.C., has a larger population than Wyoming or Vermont, each of which have two senators and a voting representative. And we have to talk about the composition of that population: It’s a plurality Black, majority Black and brown city, and there’s a long history of the District’s political rights being limited for that reason. The right to home rule—for the city’s residents to even elect a mayor and council—was rejected by Congress and by many white Washingtonians through most of the 20th century, historian Kyla Sommers writes in The Washington Post.

Jenna Portnoy at WaPo: 

For the first time since the establishment of the District of Columbia 230 years ago, the House of Representatives voted to declare the city as the nation’s 51st state, a legislative milestone that supporters say begins to right historic wrongs.

The vote on Friday afternoon, which fell mostly along party lines, comes as the United States grapples with systemic racism that District officials say has led to the disenfranchisement of the 700,000 residents of the nation’s capital.

D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), who was watching the proceedings from a restaurant on the Southwest Waterfront, waved her hands above her head in celebration as the bill passed, according to a video tweeted by her office.

The bill had 227 House co-sponsors, more than enough to pass, and 40 co-sponsors in the Senate — all Democrats. One Democrat voted against it, Rep. Collin Peterson, whose Minnesota district heavily favored President Trump in 2016.

The White House confirmed Thursday that it opposes statehood, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) says he will not bring the legislation to a vote in his majority Republican chamber.

[...]

Norton’s bill, H.R. 51, would shrink the seat of the federal government to a two-square-mile enclave, including the White House, Capitol Hill, the Supreme Court and other federal buildings, which would remain under congressional control.

The rest of the District would become known as the State of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth, named for abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who was born a slave on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and later lived in Anacostia.

Even if Democrats take control of the Senate, they would need 60 votes for the bill to overcome a likely filibuster.