POLITICS
The Politics of Washington, D.C. Statehood
Republican opposition to D.C. statehood is about race and partisanship, not constitutionality
Next Tuesday, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will hold a hearing on S. 51, a bill to grant statehood to the District of Columbia.
Congressional Republicans uniformly oppose the bill, alleging statehood requires amending the Constitution. The Constitution’s Enclave Clause lets Congress make “exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever” for the District, precluding forming a state in the District. Opponents of the bill, including West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin — the pivotal vote in the Senate Democratic caucus — thus believe that District statehood would require amending the Enclave Clause.
Manchin is wrong. Statehood does not require a constitutional amendment.
If you read the bill closely, S. 51 is carefully crafted to cede much of the District to a new state, “Washington, Douglass Commonwealth.” This would leave the remaining, reduced federal enclave under the sole authority of Congress, thereby satisfying the requirements of the Enclave Clause. The Supreme Court has even affirmed that Congress’ plenary power under the enclave clause allows cession of District land to another state. And while S. 51 creates a constitutional complication — the reduced, uninhabited enclave would retain electoral college representation under 23rd Amendment — the bill calls for repeal of the 23rd Amendment.
So, if S. 51 is constitutional, why do Republicans oppose statehood for Washington, D.C.?
In recent House hearings, Republicans decried the statehood bill as a ploy by Democrats to inflate their chamber majorities by adding seats from the left-leaning District. Recent Senate majorities have been unusually narrow, raising the stakes of adding two seats from the District. Republicans, relying on the chamber’s overrepresentation of their increasingly white, rural constituency, stand to lose if S. 51 passes and somewhat levels the representational playing field by granting two seats to the District’s left-leaning, predominantly Black and Brown electorate.
This partisanship is not new. In my forthcoming book, Hidden Laws: How State Constitutions Stabilize American Politics, I note that congressional admission of new states has long involved bitter partisan struggles over race and representation.
Take, for example, the Admissions and Enabling Acts of 1889–90.
By the Fiftieth Congress of 1887–1889, Republicans held a narrow one-seat Senate majority and a nineteen seat House deficit. Jim Crow voter disenfranchisement cut into the Southern Black Republican electorate, sapping Republican House seats, and prompting Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge to propose a Federal Elections Bill letting federal judges supervise Southern registrars. But Democrats blocked the bill.
Congressional Republicans instead focused on the Senate.
They passed on a party-line vote the Enabling Act of 1889, admitting Montana and Washington, and in an unprecedented move, splitting the Dakota Territory into two new states. Except for Montana, each of these underpopulated territories had voted solidly Republican in territorial elections, and in late 1889 and early 1890, the resulting state legislatures sent eight Republican senators to Congress. Republicans then used their inflated Senate majority to add Republican-leaning Idaho and Wyoming on a party-line vote in early 1890, gaining another four senators and a chamber majority that lasted almost uninterrupted until the New Deal, even as the Party failed to win a majority of votes cast House elections. The Party then used this Senate majority to block statehood petitions from Democratic-leaning, Spanish-speaking Arizona and New Mexico.
This case offers a few lessons.
The first — and the main argument of the book — is that statehood petitions often get tangled in national controversies over race, partisanship, and congressional representation. While New Mexico, for example, had petitioned for statehood since 1848, admission of the territory threatened to create a Catholic, Spanish-speaking state just as Congress was struggling to cement Protestant values in the West, particularly in the Mormon Utah Territory, which long bucked congressional and executive antipolygamy reforms.
Yet Congress freely admitted Protestant, Republican-leaning Western states, leaving these states to experiment with constitutional policymaking. Montana, for example allowed direct senatorial elections in 1895 and partial female enfranchisement in 1889, well ahead of the matching federal amendments of 1913 and 1920. Since all states impose lower amendment thresholds than does the federal Constitution and, with smaller legislatures, can better coordinate to constitutional reform, states have allowed constitutional experimentation lacking at the federal level.
This may seem like a difficult lesson for the District of Columbia’s 712,000 residents, who pay the highest per capita income taxes in the country yet lack full congressional representation and legislative and budgetary home rule. But should Democrats gain a few more Senate seats in next year’s midterm elections while holding the House, the District’s two-century long fight for statehood may finally come to an end.
