DC statehood has always been an uphill battle because of the paternalistic roots of the federal government’s relationship with the nation’s capital. | Win McNamee/Getty Images
Just a few years ago, the movement for Washington, DC, statehood was gaining steam. In 2020 and 2021, Democrats in the House passed bills to make DC the 51st state, re-energizing the fight to grant residents of the nation’s capital representation in Congress.
Those bills were ultimately doomed because of strong Republican opposition. But now, statehood for Washington, DC, seems even more far-fetched. Earlier this week, President Donald Trump took the extraordinary step of ordering a federal takeover of DC’s local police department. He also mobilized the DC National Guard, deploying troops in the city to allegedly fight crime.
This didn’t necessarily come as a surprise. For some time, Trump has fantasized about taking over DC altogether, saying that the federal government would do a much better job running the city than its current mayor, Muriel Bowser.
So, how did DC go from building a growing movement for statehood to a hostile federal takeover in just a few short years?
The simple answer is that Republicans are now in power, and they’d like to make an example out of DC. But even without Republican control of the White House or Congress, statehood and full self-governance have always been an uphill battle, because there’s also a deeper history of the federal government’s paternalistic relationship with the nation’s capital.
DC’s self-governance has always been controversial
Washington, DC, was specifically established to serve as the nation’s capital. The US Constitution gave Congress the power to create a small federal district that doesn’t exceed 10 square miles to serve as the seat of the federal government. In 1790, Congress passed the Residence Act, which paved the way to build a new capital along the Potomac River. And so, DC was established by carving out land from Maryland and Virginia (which later took its portion back) and was under Congress’s jurisdiction. That meant there would be no democratically elected mayor or local government.
But DC grew into a full city, with residents living there on a permanent basis — not just to serve the federal government. And, for most of the city’s history, those residents were entirely disenfranchised — unable to get representation in Congress or even vote for president. That changed during the civil rights era, when DC’s voting rights (or lack thereof) garnered more attention, in no small part because of the city’s large Black population, which, by 1960, had become the majority. As a result, the constitution was officially amended in 1961 to grant DC residents the right to vote for president, but the amendment stopped short of granting them representation in Congress.
Even then, DC didn’t have a democratically elected local government. So, in 1974, Congress passed the DC Home Rule Act, which allowed residents to elect their own mayor and council. That finally gave the nation’s capital some form of self-governance, but Congress ultimately retained its power to overrule local laws and budgets if it so pleased.
The federal government’s resistance to giving DC autonomy is ultimately rooted in racism. Known as Chocolate City, DC was the epicenter of Black arts, culture, and politics. And since it gained the right to vote for local officials, DC has only ever elected Black mayors. As a result, opposition to DC statehood has often leaned on the paternalistic and racist notion that Black people can’t be trusted to govern themselves — that the city’s residents simply don’t know what’s best for them. That’s why conservative lawmakers have pointed to issues like crime or corruption as evidence that DC can’t be trusted to be a state.
In 2021, for example, Steve Scalise, the Republican House majority leader, wrote, “Why should the District of Columbia be granted statehood when it can’t even perform basic governmental duties like protecting its residents from criminals?” Scalise also said that the city was simply too corrupt to be a state. These kinds of arguments have been repeated by people on the right for decades, despite the fact that states, including Scalise’s own Louisiana, are well-known for their corruption and crime. So even if those issues were a legitimate concern (they shouldn’t be), then why should the residents of DC be treated any differently than other Americans?
Part of the reason in recent years has less to do with explicit racism and more to do with partisan politics. If DC were to get full representation in Congress, it would undoubtedly benefit Democrats, since the city is overwhelmingly Democratic. (Trump, for example, only got 6.5 percent of the vote in DC in 2024.) That explains why Democrats are on board with DC statehood while Republicans are fiercely opposed.
But this is the natural extension of the overt racism that has long defined opposition for DC self-governance. Before the Home Rule Act, President Lyndon B. Johnson reorganized how the district was governed and appointed Walter Washington to serve as the mayor-commissioner of DC. When Washington, who was Black, submitted his first budget to Congress, the response was astonishingly racist; John McMillan, a Democrat from South Carolina who chaired the House Committee on the District of Columbia, sent Washington a truckload of watermelons.
Now, Republicans might not play the same tactics, but the degree to which they ignore Black Washingtonians and their rights is unmistakable. “Yes, Wyoming is smaller than Washington by population, but it has three times as many workers in mining, logging, and construction, and ten times as many workers in manufacturing,” Tom Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas, said in 2021 in a speech opposing DC statehood. “In other words, Wyoming is a well-rounded working-class state.”
But, as I noted then, roughly 140,000 people in DC’s labor force were considered working class in 2016, according to the Center for American Progress, while about 220,000 workers in Wyoming were considered working class. The most notable difference in those two populations is that the vast majority of DC’s working class was made up of people of color, while 84 percent of Wyoming’s working class was white.
The consequences of federal control
Federal intervention in DC’s affairs has often poorly served residents, and not just because they have, through the years, been denied voting rights, self-governance, and representation in Congress. Congress’s meddling in local laws has ultimately served the interests of lawmakers from other states and not the interests of the people living in the city.
One of the most notable examples of this was during the AIDS epidemic. In the 1990s, DC spent money on needle exchange programs, which research has shown is critical in preventing the spread of infectious diseases, including HIV/AIDS. But, Congress banned the city from using its own funds on needle exchange programs — a ban that lasted nine years. During that time, the city saw a surge in infections and had the highest rate of HIV per capita in the country, even exceeding rates in developing countries. And, because DC was a majority Black city, the policy disproportionately affected Black people.
Trump’s plan to federalize the local police force follows those exact footsteps — placing his own interests above those of DC residents and their elected officials. The move is a blatantly political one. Trump is using DC as a warning to other cities: If you pass progressive criminal justice laws, then he will try his best to intervene.
It’s a paternalistic instinct, one that is anti-democratic at its core, taking local control away from the hands of voters. And what’s unfortunate for DC is that Trump’s move is not entirely unprecedented. It falls in line with how the federal government has long viewed DC’s self-governance: at best an inconvenience, and at worst, a threat.
