In a historic first, the House of Representatives approved a bill on Friday to admit Washington, D.C., to the union as the 51st state. If enacted into law, the bill would give the new state full autonomy to pass laws to govern itself and provide its 700,000 residents with voting representation in both chambers of Congress for the first time.
The bill passed by a vote of 232-180 with all but one Democrats in support and every Republican in opposition. It is the first time in the 219-year history of Washington, D.C., that a chamber of Congress approved a bill to admit it as a state.
“The people of D.C. not only deserve real self-government, but full representation in the Congress of the United States,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said.
Admitting D.C. as the 51st state “will bring our nation closer to our ideals,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said.
To create the state of Douglass Commonwealth, the name the D.C. Council has chosen for the state, the bill would cede the parts of downtown D.C. filled with neoclassical monuments and brutalist federal buildings to serve as the constitutionally necessary independent seat of the federal government. The rest of the current city, consisting largely of local residential and commercial property, would become the new 51st state.
The bill’s passage is a major victory for its chief sponsor Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D), the second elected non-voting delegate for the district. She first brought statehood legislation to the floor of the House for a vote in 1993, but it failed. A majority of Democrats and all but one Republican opposed it then. Its passage 27 years later signals the great changes that have occurred in the country and the Democratic Party since then.
The vote was “deeply personal,” Norton said, since her great-grandfather fled from slavery to D.C. where her family has lived ever since. “For three generations, my family has been denied the rights other Americans have been granted,” she said.
“There’s no way to look at it except in its historic context and see it as a turning point in the history of our country,” Norton told HuffPost ahead of the vote.
The vote, while historic, was largely symbolic of the growing support for statehood among Democrats. House Republicans were unanimous in their opposition, labeling the vote an unconstitutional and partisan stunt. They argued that D.C. did not have enough jobs in manufacturing, logging and mining to be a proper state while proclaiming that “real Americans” did not reside in the city. Republicans inst