The House Oversight Committee on Tuesday advanced legislation to make the District of Columbia the 51st state, marking the first vote in Congress in nearly 30 years to grant full congressional representation for residents of the nation’s capital. Eleanor Holmes Norton, DC non-voting delegate who has pushed for statehood since she began serving in Congress in 1991, said: “Congress has two choices: It can continue to exercise undemocratic authority over 700,000 American citizens who live in the nation’s capital, treating them in the words of Frederick Douglass, as ‘aliens, not citizens, but subjects.’ Or it can live up to the nation’s promise and ideals.”
The NAACP supports this legislation. In addition to the points mentioned in an NAACP Washington Bureau Fast Action Update below, in 2019 Washington DC had a population of 705,455 — greater than Wyoming and Vermont, close to Alaska, both North and South Dakota, and not so far off from Delaware and Rhode Island. Please show your support for DC Statehood.
A Fast Action Update from the NAACP Washington Bureau.
On 6/26/2020, the US House of Representatives passed by a margin of 232 yeas to 180 nays H.R.51, the NAACP strongly-supported “Washington, D.C. Admissions Act”. This historic legislation grants full voting and statehood rights to the hardworking men and women of Washington, D.C. Despite the fact that the citizens of Washington, D.C.pay federal taxes, serve on juries and defend our Nation in times of war like most other Americans, the residents of the District of Columbia are barred from having voting representation on the floor of the U.S. House and the U.S.Senate.
District residents currently pay more federal taxes per person than the residents of any state — and provide more revenue to the federal government than more than 30 other states — yet District residents have no voice in passing these taxes or deciding how they will be spent. This classic example of “taxation without representation” is contrary to everything that this nation is founded on. This means that over 700,000 people, almost half of whom are African American (with Caucasians making up about 45% of the population), are paying taxes to and dying for a government in which they have no say.
The District has balanced its budget 24 times in the last 24 years. The city already performs duties that most state do: it operates its own schools, it manages state Medicaid programs, and it receives federal block grants. Like states, D.C.issues drivers licenses, license plates, and birth and death certificates. It regulates its banks and insurance companies, operates a state-based Affordable Care Act marketplace, and enforces environmental regulations. For the purposes of thousands of federal laws, Washington, D.C. acts as a state.
Not only do D.C. citizens not have a voting representative in either the U.S. House or Senate, but to add insult to injury, lawmakers are always interfering with D.C. laws and referendums which are democratically supported by the majority of D.C. voters. Congress has been known to treat D.C. like its own personal “petri dish” dictating what the city can and cannot do and how it may spend its own money.
H.R.51 now goes to the Senate for consideration and joins S. 631, companion legislation introduced by Sen. Carper (DE). The NAACP strongly supports full representation for all the residents of the District of Columbia by making the city a state. The democratically elected government of the District of Columbia should decide what is best on local issues, and we need to make it clear that the residents of the District of Columbia should not be used as test subjects for questionable and sometimes objectionable programs.
