For more than 200 years, the District of Columbia has been designated as a federal district and not a state, but in light of recent events, Black Washington, D.C., elected officials are pushing even harder for statehood as a method of protecting their community’s sovereignty from federal overreach by the White House.
President Donald Trump ordered the National Guard to take control of D.C.’s police force in August, which is allowed in the U.S. Constitution for up to 30 days, due to the city’s designation.
“One byproduct of when we have some national attention is our fellow Americans realize that we’re not just like them,” said Washington’s Mayor Muriel Bowser at the opening of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Annual Legislative Conference last week.
“Even though we’re full-blooded Americans, even though we pay taxes, even though we go to war, and even though we’re right here, a stone’s throw from the capital, our congresswoman doesn’t have a vote, and we have no representation in this city. We are the definition of being taxed without being represented.”
Never about ‘public safety’
Under the guise of lowering crime and homelessness in a Black-led city, troops have mostly been patrolling train stations and tourist-heavy areas of the capital. They made more than 2,100 arrests in the first few weeks, and immigration arrests by masked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents spiked, according to the Associated Press. Bowser has given some credit to the federal deployment for a drop in crime, including an 87% decline in carjackings, said the AP.
However, that has not slowed her advocacy for statehood on behalf of D.C. At the conference, she said that coming into 2025, the city was the “fastest-growing jurisdiction in the nation,” student enrollment and achievement was up, and violent crime was already down by 35%.
“This is a place that is beautiful, clean, and safe; where people want to live and raise their children. That is the real D.C.,” said Bowser. “[But] we’re not represented, we are also not fully autonomous, because the president of the United States by law, by our own home rule charter, can take us over for almost no reason.”
History
Article I, Section 8, Clause 17of the U.S. Constitution — known as the “District Clause” — dictates that the “Seat of the Government” be on federal land under Congress, and not controlled by any single state. Maryland and Virginia ceded land to create the District in 1790. Technically, the language of the Constitution states that the seat size should “not exceed ten miles square.” In 1846, Congress redefined D.C.’s borders, returning part of it to Virginia (now Arlington and Alexandria counties).
The DC Home Rule Act was passed in 1973 to give residents of D.C some semblance of local governance. This means D.C. is similar to other states, but its government can’t make and enforce laws, create its own agencies, have autonomy over its court and prison system, or operate without interference from the federal level. D.C also has no voting power in either Congress or the U.S Senate. Regardless, residents still have to pay federal income taxes, serve in the military, and participate on juries, etc. The city has had an elected mayor since 1974 — Walter E. Washington was the first — and also elects its City Council.
In 2016, Bowser and the New Columbia Statehood Commission completed a referendum that imagined the “State of Washington, D.C.” with its own state constitution and new borderlines. The proposed state map had the National Capital Service Area, a two-mile stretch for federal buildings, that would be the “seat” of the federal government as defined in the Constitution. This would include institutions like the White House, Capitol, Supreme Court, and National Mall.
The closest D.C. has gotten to statehood so far was in 2020, when the House of Representatives introduced the Washington, DC Admission Act (H.R.51).
Creating a police state
For locals, D.C.’s home rule is one of the most significant pieces of legislation that is under attack from the Trump administration with the introduction of the District of Columbia Home Rule Improvement Act this September.
“They’re passing bills to take away our Attorney General. They’re threatening to take away our home rule, which [allows] us to elect our own leadership — our mayor, our council, and beyond — so we need you guys to contact your senators, contact your congressmembers, make D.C the 51st state or at the very least, allow us to have local governance, because we deserve to govern ourselves,” said Congressmember Dr. Adeoye I. Yakubu Owolewa at a panel at a CBC conference mixer. “We deserve to pass laws. We deserve to have a full budget without [people] in the way.”
Other bills that are affecting D.C.’s ability to self-govern include District of Columbia Electronic Transmittal of Legislation Act (H.R. 2693); Make the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful Act (H.R. 5103), which removes “graffiti” and restores certain monuments; and the DC Criminal Reforms to Immediately Make Everyone Safer Act (DC CRIMES or H.R. 4922). The D.C. Crimes Act, in particular, prohibits “progressive soft-on-crime sentencing policy,” lowers D.C.’s definition of a “youth” from under 25 years old to under 18, and removes the ability of judges to sentence youth offenders below the mandatory minimum.
Other far-right Republican proposed bills have been drafted but not yet introduced, like the District of Columbia Cash Bail Reform Act, which requires pre-trial jail time for defendants charged with crimes of violence and for those with cash bail. More bills in the works also aim to change sentencing times for crimes, repeal laws that give youth offenders under 18 a second chance with an expunged conviction record, criminalize homelessness, remove officers and union reps from the police complaints board, take away the police union’s bargaining power, and change judicial courts and attorney general nominations.