Let’s start with the obvious: The Senate is a broken, undemocratic mess. It is already more unrepresentative than was ever intended, and that won’t change any time soon—by 2040, more than half of the population will live in just eight states, giving a disproportionate amount of electoral power to a small segment of the population that is not reflective of the majority of the country. The Senate is now a place where popular legislation goes to die. It is a major source of federal dysfunction, and it’s just getting worse.
But there’s a way to start fixing it: Make the District of Columbia a state.
Right now, somehow, the Senate is controlled by the GOP, despite the fact that their ideas, like, say, the GOP tax bill that transferred enormous amounts of wealth to the already superrich, are incredibly unpopular and the fact that the states they represent contain an ever-shrinking slice of the population. Granting statehood to D.C. addresses this problem by giving two new senators to a region that is more reflective of how most Americans actually live: in dense, urban areas that are largely diverse and progressive. As more Americans concentrate in fewer and fewer states, the only real solution is to add more states.
So why hasn’t it happened yet? Why do D.C. residents—like us—languish as second-class citizens in our own country while the Senate runs further and further to the right without a popular mandate? Well, it’s racism. Here’s a quick history lesson: Lincoln signed a bill into law that abolished slavery in D.C. a full nine months before his national Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Even before emancipation, the District was home to a growing community of free black people. After emancipation, the free black population continued to grow to a majority.
It didn’t take long for the former Confederate soldiers and white supremacists who had made their way to Congress to notice and start making explicitly racist arguments to deny representation to D.C. One in particular, Alabama senator John Tyler Morgan (a former Confederate army general and slave-holder), not only supported denying a vote for D.C., but sought to make the District a model for black disenfranchisement for the rest of the country, too. In a truly horrific speech, Morgan said that disenfranchising D.C. was “necessary” to “burn down the barn to get rid of the rats…the rats being the negro population and the barn being the government of the District of Columbia.” Morgan continued:
To this day, D.C. is still a majority-minority jurisdiction, and still subject to interference from members of Congress with questionable motivations. In the 1960s, the first black president-appointed mayor of D.C. submitted his proposed budget to Congress for approval. In response, the Southern chairman of House committee in charge of D.C. oversight sent back a truckload of watermelons. In the 1970s, Congress granted D.C. greater local legislative autonomy (“home rule”), but Congress still has the power to review all bills passed by the D.C. city council. And Republican members can and do impose their conservative agenda on us—for example, by blocking legal marijuana sales and imposing the only federally funded private-school voucher program in the country, despite local opposition.
Disenfranchising black people in D.C. is not particularly shocking, especially given that the Senate was originally designed to give disproportionate power to white men in slave-owning states. The Senate still gives disproportionate power to those same states, and, more recently, Republican legislatures have suppressed the vote in communities of color in places like North Carolina, North Dakota, and Georgia. So it should come as no surprise that the chief opponent of statehood is none other than the Grim Reaper himself, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. He has dismissed proposals designed to increase participation in democracy as a “power grab” and has specifically called statehood for D.C. “full-bore socialism.” That’s because he knows that the cure for a broken democracy is more democracy—more participation from more people. People like D.C. residents, who would elect progressive senators who’d block McConnell and Trump’s worst impulses.
Remember Betsy DeVos, Trump’s uniquely unqualified education secretary? DeVos, a billionaire who never attended a public school and who thinks guns should be allowed in schools so that teachers can effectively fight off grizzly bears (seriously), is so controversial that she ultimately needed Mike Pence to provide the tie-breaking vote (51-50) to be confirmed to her post. She was the first education secretary in U.S. history to require such a tie-breaker. If D.C. were a state, there’d be no “Secretary” DeVos. She’d be back home lounging on her yacht, not caping for predatory for-profit colleges, helping Trump defund the Special Olympics, or rewriting sexual-assault guidelines so that they’re more favorable to assailants.
That’s why representation for D.C. is about more than just democracy for D.C.—it’s about American democracy writ large. There are numerous democracy reforms on the 2020 docket that are necessary to make this country, at long last, operate in service of all the people. The status quo dooms us to a future where an ideological minority—McConnell and his ilk—continue to hoard unearned power and to drive the priorities of their corporate donors. In the short term, there is no plausible path for Democrats to secure a 60-vote majority. But there is a path to at least 51 votes in 2020 and in 2022. If progressives regain a majority, we must capitalize on it by pursuing statehood for D.C., which not only gives a voice to residents in the Senate but would also deliver two additional votes needed to pass the rest of the slate of reforms that are essential to save our democracy—big stuff like automatic voter registration, court reform, and campaign-finance laws.
Doing nothing is not an option. Letting D.C. residents languish as second-class citizens in their own country is not an option. A functioning democracy is possible, but unless we change the Senate, we can’t change the country.
Ezra Levin is the co-executive director of the Indivisible Project and the coauthor of the forthcoming We Are Indivisible: A Blueprint for Democracy After Trump. Before founding Indivisible along with his spouse, Leah Greenberg, Ezra was an anti-poverty policy advocate and legislative staffer to Texas Democratic representative Lloyd Doggett.
Meagan Hatcher-Mays is the Indivisible Project's director of democracy policy and a former aide to the District of Columbia's nonvoting delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives, Eleanor Holmes Norton. You can find Meagan on Twitter at @ImportantMeagan.
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