The dumbing down of the D.C. statehood debate

It was a true commentary on the polarization of our current politics — the idea that anything can be best distilled to raw political power and should be opposed as such.

One of the biggest emerging arguments against D.C. statehood is a thoroughly partisan one. The idea isn’t so much that D.C. doesn’t necessarily deserve voting rights in the House and Senate, as much as that it would be a boon to Democrats. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has pushed this idea extensively in recent years, casting both the ideas of D.C. and Puerto Rico statehood as thinly veiled efforts to gain Democratic votes.

Multiple Republican Congress members picked up on this at Monday’s hearing.

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) suggestively asked D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) where she would place “the ideological makeup of D.C. relative to other cities in the country. Is it slightly Democratic, very Democratic, very Republican?” Foxx, as with virtually anyone with even a passing knowledge of our country’s politics, knows the answer. Bowser acknowledged that D.C. was “more than slightly Democratic,” understating things by a fair amount. (Washington gave each of the past four Democratic presidential nominees at least 90 percent of the vote.)

Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) cast this as “a key part of the radical leftist agenda to reshape America,” likening it to the Green New Deal, among other things.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) has even cited the political benefit, telling The Washington Post recently that “there’s a national political logic for it, too, because the Senate has become the principal obstacle to social progress across a whole range of issues.”

Even Republican Donald Trump, after launching his presidential campaign in 2015, suggested that he was open to D.C. statehood (albeit at a time when he was opening up a D.C. hotel and the seriousness of his campaign was debatable). “I would like to do whatever is good for the District of Columbia, because I love the people,” Trump said at the time. Trump later reversed course, aligning with his party.

It’s fair to argue this is about partisan advantage, but that doesn’t mean it’s “radical,” and it doesn’t address the merits of the situation.

Other arguments advanced more novel ideas against statehood.

“D.C. would be the only state — the only state — without an airport, without a car dealership, without a capital city, without a landfill, without even a name of its own, and we can go on and on and on,” Hice said.

It would indeed be unusual for a city to be made a state, but D.C. does have car dealerships. It also has three airports in proximity with “Washington” in their names.

And none of the things Hice mentioned are prerequisites for statehood. Indeed, there are literal countries without their own airports. In addition, Delaware, the home state of our current president, has gone for years until recently without regularly scheduled commercial flights. Washington also has a larger population than one state — Wyoming — which some might argue is a better metric for voting rights than anything else.

(None of these arguments, it bears noting, would fare nearly so well for Puerto Rican statehood.)

One of the witnesses Monday had perhaps the most interesting take on why Washington doesn’t need statehood. The Heritage Foundation’s Zack Smith argued that D.C. has plenty of say, given that members of Congress might see lawn signs that could influence their votes.

“There’s no question that D.C. residents already impact the national debate,” Smith said. “For the members here today, how many of you saw D.C. statehood yard signs or bumper stickers or banners on your way to this hearing today? I certainly did. Where else in the nation could such simple actions reach so many members of Congress?”

The first problem is that many members of Congress aren’t really traveling through much of the residential neighborhoods of Washington — at least those filled with natives or longtime D.C. residents — to get to work. (Many live close to the Capitol, alongside lots of other federal government employees with less interest in the voting rights of the District’s residents.) The second is the idea that putting up a yard sign is hardly the same as having voting power. As The Washington Post’s Philip Bump noted, D.C. residents have had “taxation without representation” on their license plates for years; it hasn’t yet convinced Congress to act.

Again there are reasons, philosophically, to think that Washington should remain a federal district. Even many Democrats used to feel this way, as little as a quarter-century ago (though there had been overwhelming support for congressional voting rights). At the national level, polling shows that the needle has moved toward statehood, but not in an overwhelming way. And you might even argue that such a change should require a constitutional amendment.

But that’s a tougher argument than pitching this as being about partisan politics, airports, landfills and yard signs.