House passes bill that would make D.C. the 51st state

[Crtcl Rice Theory 2,432]

https://www.axios.com/dc-statehood-bill-house-vote-1575b95c-4da2-4992-8c89-1c60b1997d3c.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=editorial&utm_content=politics-breaking

 

The House of Representatives voted 216-208 on Thursday to pass a bill that would grant statehood to Washington, D.C.

The big picture: It's the second year in a row that the Democratic-controlled House has voted to recognize D.C. as the 51st state. The bill now heads to a divided Senate, where it faces little chance of reaching the 60 votes necessary to send to President Biden's desk

[Neonred 3,632]

Kid of dumb.  Wasn't DC purposely created NOT to be a state?  

 

And if it's so important to be represented, why not give what's left of the original carve out back to Maryland?

 

Problem solved.

Edited April 23, 2021 by Neonred

[Dashinka 24,732]

35 minutes ago, Neonred said:

Kid of dumb.  Wasn't DC purposely created NOT to be a state?  

 

And if it's so important to be represented, why not give what's left of the original carve out back to Maryland?

 

Problem solved.

Much too logical and of course it would not result in two more Senators.

[Dashinka 24,732]

So is there also a Constitutional Amendment to go along with this scheme?

 

Because of the District's unique character as the federal city, neither the Framers nor Con­gress accorded the inhabitants the right to elect Members of the House of Representatives or the Senate. In exchange, however, the District's resi­dents received the multifarious benefits of the national capital. As Justice Joseph Story noted in Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, "there can be little doubt, that the inhabi­tants composing [the District] would receive with thankfulness such a blessing, since their own importance would be thereby increased, their interests be subserved, and their rights be under the immediate protection of the represen­tatives of the whole Union." In effect, the Framers believed that the residents were "virtu­ally" represented in the federal interest for a strong, prosperous capital.

There have been a number of efforts to change this original design, including a proposed constitutional amendment (passed by Congress in 1977) that would have granted the District of Columbia congressional voting rep­resentation "as if it were a state." This amend­ment, however, was not ratified in the seven-year period established by Congress. Other proposals have included a retrocession of most, or all, of the District to Maryland-a plan that Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in 1964 deemed impractical and unconstitutional-and the admission of Washington, D.C., to the Union as the fifty-first state.

In 2000, the courts rejected a series of argu­ments suggesting that the District's inhabitants were, on various constitutional and policy grounds, entitled to voting representation in Congress without an amendment. See Adams v. Clinton (2000). More recently, the courts have rejected efforts to invalidate a congres­sionally imposed limit on the District's ability to tax nonresident commuters. See Banner v. United States (2004). In that case, the court noted that, "simply put…the District and its residents are the subject of Congress' unique powers, exercised to address the unique circumstances of our nation's capital.

Statehood is now the clear preference of Dis­trict of Columbia voting-rights advocates, but the proposal has never excited much support in Congress and would, in any case, also require a constitutional amendment since an independ­ent territory, subject to the ultimate authority of Congress, was a critical part of the Framers' original design for an indestructible federal union of indestructible states.

 

https://www.heritage.org/the-constitution/report/the-constitution-and-the-district-columbia

[TBoneTX 45,918]

18 hours ago, Dashinka said:

two more Senators

One of whom will be Marion Barry, whom they'll exhume and overwhelmingly elect in perpetuity.

Edited April 24, 2021 by TBoneTX