The election of Barack Obama, the first African-American president in our nation’s history, is itself evidence of how far we have come in a short time.   Along with the enlarged Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, this provides the opportunity to fundamentally change course from the path set by President Bush.

Nowhere is the hope for change stronger than here in the District of Columbia.  For over two centuries, the citizens of our nation’s capital have played host to a federal government that has treated the District as its own private plantation.  With no representation in Congress and lacking the right to self-government enjoyed by the 50 states, citizens of the District have long sought equal citizenship but have received only a local government firmly under the thumb of Congress.

During this past Congress, D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton and Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) sponsored a bill that would give the District a single vote in the House of Representatives – but that addressed neither representation in the Senate nor the need for self-government.  The bill included an additional vote in the House for Utah, a deal brokered by Davis to drum up support among Republicans by offsetting a seat in overwhelmingly Democratic D.C. with one in predominately Republican Utah.  The bill passed the House but failed to overcome a filibuster in the Senate.  Delegate Norton and Mayor Adrian Fenty have said they will press Congress to take up the bill again in the session beginning next year.

But is this all we should demand?  After all, in a 1980 referendum, D.C. voters spoke out on their vision for the District’s political future, overwhelmingly choosing to become the 51st U.S. state.  The voters recognized that only statehood would put the District on an equal footing with the rest of the country and provide the full voting representation and genuine self-government that the Constitution guarantees only to states.

Congress took up the Norton-Davis bill at a time when a Republican occupied the White House and Democrats held the slimmest of majorities in the Senate.  But come January all that will change.  A Democrat – one who has publicly endorsed D.C. statehood – will occupy the White House.  The Democratic caucus in the Senate will jump from 51 members to at least 58 (and possibly more pending the still-contested outcome in Minnesota) and the party’s already-solid majority in the House is even larger.  The size of the Democratic caucus is critical because – as much as we might hope that support for democratic rights would transcend partisan considerations – Democrats are more likely to support statehood for overwhelmingly Democratic D.C.

So why stop at a single vote in the House?  Norton and Fenty counsel against demanding too much too soon.  But the political stars may never again be aligned in the District’s favor as much as they are now.  It’s possible that Democrats could lose seats in 2010, thereby diminishing the District’s chances.  And the District is a very different place than in 1993 when the previous statehood bill was defeated in Congress.  Then, the District was plagued by a crack epidemic and stood on the brink of fiscal insolvency.  Today, crime is declining and the District has produced balanced budgets for 12 consecutive year.  The district has become a magnet for retailers, and more people find it a desirable place to live.

Norton, in particular, has opposed an immediate push for statehood because the District lost some of its state responsibilities, such as prisons and courts, in the 1997 DC Revitalization Act.  But this should be no obstacle.  A statehood bill could simply include a provision that would require the District to assume these functions.  The financial burden of taking on these duties would be substantially eased by the fact that statehood would enable the District to enact a commuter tax – something it is currently forbidden to do. Moreover, never in our country’s history has voting representation been awarded by any method other than statehood, and a voting-rights bill is certain to be challenged in court.  Should we abandon the constitutionally tested path of statehood for the uncertain ground of stateless voting rights?

Instead of settling for less than we need, we should demand what we want.  Delegate Norton, with the support of Mayor Fenty and the rest of the D.C. government, must greet the new Congress with a bill to make the District the 51st state.  The time to act is now.

Bill Mosley, a member of the Stand Up! for Democracy in D.C. Coalition (www.FreeDC.org), wrote a regular column on the D.C. democracy movement for The Common Denominator from 2003-2006.

Read this article online at DC Statehood - Yes We Can!