Statehood for the District of Columbia: A Selection from David Frum’s Trumpocalypse (2020)

“Bring the Senate a little closer into line with the American population by conferring statehood upon the residential areas of the District of Columbia. Many people wrongly imagine that such a change would require a super-majority or even a constitutional amendment. But once the filibuster is ended, Congress could admit ‘New Columbia’ to statehood by majority vote of two houses, plus a presidential signature.

The new state would have a population greater than Wyoming or Vermont. At its present rate of growth, New Columbia will overtake Alaska and North Dakota before 2030. New Columbia would be less dependent on federal assistance than twenty-one other states, including not only poor states like Mississippi and Louisiana but relatively prosperous ones like Texas and Georgia.

DC statehood would also deprive conservative congressional Republicans of their favorite test kitchen for serving unpalatable culture war dishes to an unwilling population. The new state could write its own rules on guns, abortion, and other emotive subjects rather than have those rules written for it by out-of-touch, out-of-district legislators who answer to other voters rather than its own.

Under present demographic conditions, DC statehood would promptly add two Democratic senators, with a high likelihood that one or both would be African American. This would help to redress both the partisan and racial unrepresentativeness of the Senate.

There would be some tough complexities to work out, especially since many valuable blocks of the city would have to be carved out for a new shrunken federal zone under the Congress, the monuments, the White House, and the blocks in between. The money discussions could be rancorous. But in the end, there would be a Senate that looked a little more like the actual country than it does today.”—David Frum, Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy (2020)