This post is offered as a response to a broadcast of WBUR's OnPoint podcast, "Inside The Push To Make Washington, D.C. The 51st State." The podcast featured, among other personalities, Eleanor Holmes Norton, the DC Congressional Delegate to the US House of Representatives, who has introduced legislation to make DC a state in every Congressional session since she first entered Congress in 1991. The broader theme of the podcast was that, since the January 6 attack on the Capitol and the failure of DC civil authorities to secure National Guard support for DC Metropolitan Police in a timely manner because of the byzantine nature of federal lines of authority over the district, momentum has increased to push legislation through two houses of Congress controlled by Democrats to grant DC statehood. Conversely, Congressional Republicans remain opposed to statehood, especially insofar as DC statehood would certainly introduce two new safe Democratic Party seats into the Senate. For their part, Republican leadership is confident that the Constitution of 1787 provides an adequate barrier to the best efforts of Democrats. Article I, Section 8, outlining the enumerated powers of Congress, states, unequivocally, that Congress shall have the power "(t)o exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of Government of the United States..." Such a statement, in fact, settles the matter for me, but the Twenty-third Article of Amendment takes the argument a step further. Here, the District of Columbia is allowed to present "A number of electors of President and Vice President equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives in Congress, to which the District would be entitled were it a State, but in no event more than the least populous State, they shall be in addition to those appointed by the States, but they shall be considered for purposes of the election of President and Vice President, to be electors appointed by a State..." In these terms, and respecting the fact that the Constitution of 1787 had to be amended to grant even this much to the resident American citizens of the District of Columbia, there does not seem to be any statutory road for the good people of the District of Columbia to obtain statehood. It isn't going to happen going down this road.
If the Democrats want DC to have representation in Congress and the local authorities of the District to have comparable legislative and executive stature and privilege as the authorities of every other state government, then they are going have to think bigger than the approach they are currently taking. Rather, they need to follow their Republican counterparts and take a long look at the Constitution of 1787 to see what there is in there that might solidify their capacity to, both, grant DC statehood through the Article V amendment process, as the necessary avenue to arrive at this goal, and to shore up their own legislative capacity in order to obtain the former objective more easily. They need to look, in particular, at Article IV, Section 3. In this regard, my argument here is absolutely indebted to another podcast, from Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History, season 3, entitled "Divide and Conquer" (broadcast May 17, 2018). The particular Constitutional provision referenced states that "(n)ew States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress." Much ado can be made regarding bad punctuation in this paragraph, but the gist of the argument is that Congress can make new states out of parts of existing states if the legislatures of such states agree to their partitioning and a Congressional majority can be established, subject further to the approval of the President, to pass legislation making such new states a legal reality. No Constitutional amendment would be needed to break off a part of, say, Florida and declare it a new state to be formally admitted into the union under the consent of its residents, provided the legislature of Florida, likewise, agrees to be partitioned by Congress.
Taking this formal process as our point of departure, Democrats are currently in control of the state legislature of New York, a state whose population is heavily skewed in relation to the scale of its principal city. What might happen if the Democrats in Congress floated the idea to Albany of allowing the five counties of New York City to be split off as an independent state, acknowledging that the two remaining states emerging from such a partitioning would remain quite large and powerful within the larger union? The remainder of New York State would be the seventh largest state by population, while New York City, as a state, would be thirteenth by population. New York City, as the fifty-first state, would, upon its admission under the consent of its residents, be entitled to two Senators and all of the representative to which its five counties are currently assigned. At the same time, Congressional Democrats might think to approach the state legislature of California with the proposal to break off Los Angeles county and establish it as an independent state. Here, again, the remainder of California would remain powerful and influential, remaining the most populous state even in the absence of Los Angeles county, while Los Angeles county would, minding our creative reconstruction of New York, become the tenth largest state even as it pushes New York City's five counties to fourteenth place. Moreover, the addition of Senate seats from these new states would indisputably raise the number of safe Democratic seats by four, all through mere Congressional statutes and the approval of two safely Democratic state legislatures! We might imagine a similar process for Chicago, but approval of the Illinois state legislature would, likely, be much dicier, to say nothing of an effort to break Houston and Galveston off from Texas with the approval of a GOP-controlled Texas legislature. But then, there's Puerto Rico, a territory ripe for statehood with a population that has shown some favorability to Democrats!
My larger point here is that the Democratic Party needs to learn to play a longer game both over control of the Senate and facilitating agendas that might require amendment of the Constitution to come to fruition. Over the past two decades, demographic predictions have yielded rosy prognostications from Democratic strategists who keep waiting for states like North Carolina and Arizona, to say nothing of Texas, to turn blue in this or that electoral cycle. All the while, Republican state legislatures have done everything in their power to gerrymander the swing states in order to push the relevance of demographic change off into the distant future. The Democratic Party needs to learn to be a little more aggressive in its efforts to create and defend a permanent legislative majority in both houses of Congress. If it doesn't do so, then the ethno-nationalist, Trumpian abortion that now constitutes the national Republican Party will continue to bend the Constitution of 1787 to its will and its partisans will increasingly be driven to violence in order to protect their shrinking base of power. For the Democrats, this is no time to think small in regard to DC statehood or anything else.
