On Monday, August 11, U.S. President Donald Trump’s authoritarian gaze landed on Washington, D.C., the city of 700,000 people in the White House’s backyard. In a move of extreme overreach, he announced that he would be invoking Section 740 of the Home Rule Act, which gives the president the ability to command D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department for “federal purposes.” Trump claimed, despite much evidence to the contrary, that D.C. was in the midst of a crippling crime wave that necessitated a federal response. That Trump’s power grab is legally dubious and almost certainly outside the ambit of what the authors of the Home Rule Act had in mind is beside the point. Because of its lack of statehood, D.C. has been a sitting target for the right wing for decades.

D.C. statehood is often framed as a daunting, pie-in-the-sky goal, but making D.C. a state would only be as hard as getting a bill passed through Congress. D.C. could be granted statehood by an act of Congress, signed into law by the president, and immediately be given the rights to self-government which residents of all 50 states currently enjoy.

A bill granting D.C. statehood, HR 51, has already been introduced in this session by D.C. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton. ( A companion Senate bill has been introduced by Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen.) In fact, bills granting D.C. statehood have been introduced consistently since 2017. In 2020, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter uprisings in D.C. and Trump’s deployment of the National Guard against protestors, the House of Representatives passed an act admitting D.C. as the 51st state. This bill, however, died in the Republican-controlled Senate.

These efforts have been largely ceremonial. Congressional Democrats should be well aware that these bills stand no chance of passing a Republican-controlled Senate chamber, nor is there any way such legislation would avoid a veto by a Republican president. The reason is simple: If granted the full benefits of statehood, D.C. would immediately become the bluest state in the country. (D.C.’s percentage of registered Democrats, 75%, is more than 20 points ahead of the next-bluest state by registration, Maryland.) That would mean two more reliably Democratic senators, and at least one more Democrat in the House.

If the shoe were on the other foot, it is hard to imagine the current Republican Party feeling any compunction about forcing through the establishment of a 51st state that would guarantee two more Republican seats in the Senate.

Instead of jumping at the opportunity to consolidate this advantage, however, Democrats have been gun shy at the prospect of pushing in earnest for D.C. statehood when the right conditions have arisen. In the first few months of Barack Obama’s first term in office Democrats held a filibuster-proof majority. This era is remembered largely for being the window that Obama and Democrats used to pass the........

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