51st | Episode 4: Is D.C. Statehood Even Legal?

Mikaela Lefrak: [00:00] Previously on 51st. Activism around D.C. statehood is at a high right now. To understand why, we've walked through more than 200 years of history. When we left off last episode, D.C. Had won back its right to govern itself. Starting in the '70s, Washingtonians could elect a and a city council and make their own laws – almost like a real state.

Walter Fauntroy: People came to understand that there was no real legitimate, democratic argument against greater home rule for the District.

Mikaela Lefrak: [00:30] It was an exciting time. became mayor and the local government fnally started to refect the city itself.

Tom Sherwood: Marion Barry was the frst person to really open the doors to the Black population of Washington and say, this is your government, come help me run it.

Mikaela Lefrak: But, it doesn't quite last. After years of budget problems, the feds come in again in the '90s and they take over management of the city's fnances. This is called the control board era. It's a wake up call for a lot of Washingtonians.

Anise Jenkins: [01:01] It was a shock to me when the control board took over and took over the Washington, D.C. and local government. That was a total shock.

Mikaela Lefrak: I'm Mikaela Lefrak and this time on 51st, we're doing a deep dove on the arguments for and against the District of Columbia becoming a state. Let's do it.

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Mikaela Lefrak: [01:25] Anise Jenkins is our frst statehood guide. She and I met for the frst time on Zoom a couple months ago. She has long gray locks and she's wearing a red statehood hat and shirt. Actually, every time I've seen her since, she's been wearing the same look.

Anise Jenkins: And we call D.C. the last plantation. That's where my cap has these chains on symbolizing D.C. in chains.

Mikaela Lefrak: Jenkins is D.C., born and raised. And growing up, she loved her city. She was like, yeah, I'm from the capital of the United States.

Anise Jenkins: [01:57] And I remember going to visit my cousins in Nashville, North Carolina. And they were always so envious of me. They were like, you live in Washington, D.C.? Wow, you live in the nation's capital. And I was like, you know, I was really proud that that's where I came from. And then when I found out the situation of D.C. residents, I really felt ashamed.

Mikaela Lefrak: [02:23] She's talking here about what happened in her life in the mid 1990s. Jenkins was working as a secretary at the time, just a regular workday person is how she described herself to me. Then Congress came in and set up the control board, taking the reins of the city's budget from local leaders to help fx the fnancial situation. And Jenkins was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. They can do that? To my city? What? This loss of local power actually felt really personal to her.

Anise Jenkins: [02:51] I felt that we were being punished because we had a Black mayor and we were a Black city. The capital of the United States of America was a majority Black city. And I felt that we were being punished for that. Mikaela Lefrak: [03:08] It wasn't just about the control board. It was about how Congress was reversing policy decisions that residents like Jenkins had voted for. Take the AIDS crisis. D.C. Had voted to use local funds to pay for a needle exchange program. Providing clean needles to drug users has been proven to help stop the spread of infections, including HIV AIDS. But then Congress decided, nope, we don't agree with that policy. We're going to bar D.C. from using its own money on a needle exchange program. It can't do that with states. Jenkins was horrifed.

Anise Jenkins: [03:41] People were dying because we didn't have the right to control our own local budget. I'll never forget that. I had a friend who died from AIDS. Steve Michael died of AIDS fghting with us for statehood. I mean, it can be a matter of life or death. It's very serious.

Mikaela Lefrak: [04:01] Jenkins helped found and still leads an organization called Stand Up for Democracy in D.C., also known as Free D.C. She started protesting regularly for statehood in the late '90s, and she has not stopped in the two decades since. I even ran into her at the March on Washington in August, a reprise of the 1963 march inspired by this summer's protests.

Jenkins was, of course, decked out in her state gear.

Anise Jenkins: [04:26] And I'm just glad we're all here.

Mikaela Lefrak: So a lot of the Free D.C. statehood advocates are here?

Anise Jenkins: Several. I won't say a lot, but several, I think came. And some didn't come because of the pandemic. Their hearts are here.

Mikaela Lefrak: Oh, yeah. And you said it's your birthday today.

Anise Jenkins: Yes, it's my birthday.

Mikaela Lefrak: How old are you turning?

Anise Jenkins: Oh, my age. I'm turning 71.

Mikaela Lefrak: [04:53] She does a lot of education and awareness work and her organization stands against any congressional interference in D.C.'s local affairs. The only solution to that, she says, is full statehood.

Anise Jenkins: [05:05] We are the old school. We are the gangstas of the statehood movement, the OGs. And I'm very proud of that. I saw ourselves as a civil rights group and it was just part of my heart.

Mikaela Lefrak: [05:23] To be clear, Jenkins and her organization were not the only people pushing for statehood, or even the frst. There have been murmurings since the late 1800s and a D.C. Statehood party put up candidates for offce in the early 1970s. Statehood popped up again and again over the next few decades, but no bill ever made it to Congress. Then Eleanor Holmes Norton got elected as D.C. delegate to Congress in the early '90s. One of the frst things she did in offce was get the U.S. House of Representatives to vote on a D.C. statehood bill.

CSPAN: [05:57] Good day from Washington, D.C. You're watching C-SPAN, a cable satellite, public affairs network. In about two and a half minutes from now, it will be 2:00 p.m. here on the East Coast, and we will begin our live gavel to gavel coverage of today's rare Sunday session of the United States House of Representatives. One bill would admit the District of Columbia to the union as the . The state would be called New Columbia. Members debated that bill for about three hours yesterday. And will continue that debate...

Clerk of the House: [06:28] the bill to provide for the admission of the state of New Columbia into the Union... Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton: Yeah, I yield two minutes to the gentleman from Georgia, Mr. Lewis.

Rep. John Lewis: [06:39] Almost 30 years ago on a Sunday afternoon, just like today, in a little town called Selma, in the heart of the Black Belt of Alabama, some of us was beaten with billy clubs and bullwhips – bloody and trampled upon by horses. Why? Just because we wanted to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the Alabama River, on the way to Montgomery. We wanted to dramatize to the nation that people of color could not register and vote. We had one simple message: One man, one vote.

Mikaela Lefrak: [07:17] Their argument for statehood then was similar to the one Washingtonians make today. They said it was a civil rights issue. A majority Black city was being disenfranchised.

Rep. John Lewis: [07:28] It is not right that we have to be here in 1993 debating whether to give an American citizen, living right here in the shadow of the Capitol, the right to be represented in Congress, to give D.C. statehood. It is not right. You know it and I know it.

Mikaela Lefrak: The objections were pretty similar to the ones today, too, but a bit more, shall we say, overt. Here are two naysayers, Tom DeLay, a Republican from Texas, and John Dingell, a Democrat from Michigan.

Rep. Tom DeLay: [08:01] The District's hug-a-thug attitude on violent crime and the continued misuse of the city's department is just one example that clearly demonstrates the fact that the District is not a state and shouldn't be considered for statehood...

Rep. John Dingell: This is not an area which is hurting. The principle of industries are provided by the federal government: government, lobbying, entertainment and tourism. These provide good times for all...

Rep. Tom DeLay: [08:29] This House would be better off considering a provision I and many of my colleagues support: the repeal of home rule. The Constitution dictates that we have a federal city. Let's take it back and clean it up.

Rep. John Dingell: There is no citizen in Washington who is chained to the pillars of the Capitol or the Washington Monument, they can leave any time...my gentlemen, I urge you to reject this.

Chairman of the House: Mr. Abercrombie from Hawaii.

Rep. Neil Aercrombie [08:59]: As a representative from the last state to be admitted into the union in 1959, I want to point out what happened with some of the other states. Alaska: arguments against population too small for statehood, resources or revenue uncertain, 99 percent of the land federally owned. Arizona: violence, territory lacks suffcient resources to sustain a state government. Colorado: state had a disproportionate share of infuence in the Congress, population territory not stable. Florida: population too small. We get to Hawaii, we get to South Dakota. The state had a disproportionate share of infuence in the Congress, the population not large enough. These are the kinds of arguments that are being brought up today. This is the kind of prejudice that was held. Violence and racism was at the root of trying to stop almost every bid for statehood from every state that has existed.

Speaker of the House, Rep. Tom Foley: [09:55] Question is on the passage of the bill is. [Those] in favor will say aye. Those opposed no.

Chair, the ayes have it.

Mikaela Lefrak: [10:07] The 1993 statehood bill gets destroyed. Only one Republican votes for it and the Democrats are split, yay or nay. But some advocates still saw it as a win. It was the frst time either Chamber of Congress had debated statehood for the District of Columbia. After that, Norton started trying lots of different, more incremental approaches besides statehood. Tom Sherwood: [10:28] Ms. Norton, would you come up and give us some remarks...

Mikaela Lefrak: In 2005, she teamed up with a Republican, Virginia Congressman Tom Davis, on this new bill. She would get a vote in Congress, like all the other representatives, if right-leaning Utah got an extra vote.

Utah claimed it had been cheated out of an extra representative because the last census didn't count all its Mormon missionaries serving overseas. And Norton was like, sure.

Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton: [10:55] Hey, one for you and one for me. That's how the Congress works anyway. Why not let it work for voting rights? The way in which he and I have decided to work on this is the way people ought to work on bills and frankly, the way most people who are friendly in the Congress work on bills. And until there is some enlightenment of the American public, Tom Davis and Eleanor Holmes Norton and my two Republican colleagues, bless them, who put in bills will be spinning our wheels in the Congress. We need help.

Mikaela Lefrak: [11:30] But the help never came. Bills failed again and again.

Some core statehood activists wish Norton had been more singularly focused on making D.C. the 51st state, rather than trying to negotiate these deals in Congress.

Paul Strauss: [11:49] People have thought that if we ask for fewer rights, we will get less resistance, and that just has not been true.

Mikaela Lefrak: This is Paul Strauss, D.C.'s shadow senator. He's not a U.S. Senator. He's elected by Washingtonians to lobby for statehood. He doesn't earn a salary for being a shadow senator. And D.C. taxpayer donations help fund his offce. He says, yeah, he wishes Norton had focused on statehood instead of these other bills.

Paul Strauss: [12:14] Well, she's certainly a very effective leader, an inspirational person in terms of her personal story, a brilliant lawyer and an effective advocate. But we have disagreed over the years. Where we have remained consistent in support of statehood, she has not been uniform on the issue. At times, took the position that statehood might not be possible, given the current structure.

Mikaela Lefrak: [12:41] Statehood activists get a big break in 2008. Barack Obama becomes president and Democrats have control of the House and the Senate. What better time to pass the statehood bill? But Democrats never make it a priority. In fact, D.C.'s local affairs end up as a bargaining chip, same as always.

In 2010, Republicans have control of the House. Obama is trying to negotiate with them to pass the federal budget and he ends up making a deal to get the budget passed. He agrees to something Republicans want: D.C. can't spend any of its own money on abortions. D.C. politicians and activists are enraged. They protest on Capitol Hill and around 40 people get arrested, including the mayor, councilmembers and our friend, Anise Jenkins.

Anise Jenkins: [13:27] I got arrested with Mayor Gray and there were like councilmembers involved in the arrest. I shared a cell with Muriel Bowser, and I think that was the start of her support for statehood.

[13:45] Bowser was a little nervous, she said, I've never done anything like this before, and she was wondering how her parents were going to look at it because she was like, I wonder how my father's going to feel about this. And I don't think he was upset at all. He was probably very proud of her.

Mikaela Lefrak: [14:04] This is when momentum for statehood really starts to boom. Bowser gets elected mayor a few years later and they start pushing hard for full statehood. No more baby steps. Mayor Muriel Bowser: [14:14] I think more and more D.C. residents are fred up about it. When people know that we don't have a vote in Congress and that we go to war and we pay taxes, they have a different view. We have to educate Americans that, hey, we're just like you, but we're the only people in the free world whose citizens in their capital city can't vote.

Mikaela Lefrak: [14:35] Her plan basically says that Congress can make D.C. a state by passing a law. It'll create a tiny little federal district that's still run by Congress that will include Capitol Hill and the National Mall and the White House. The rest of residential Washington will be its own thing. Jenkins is on board, obviously, but young activists are too.

Demi Stratmon: [14:56] OK, I think we should get started.

Mikaela Lefrak: A couple of weeks ago, I sat in on this Zoom training for people in their late teens and early 20s on how to lobby U.S. senators on statehood. It was organized by this group called 51 for 51.

Jen Mandelblatt: Hi everyone. My name is Jen Mandelblatt.

Michael: Hi guys, I'm Michael. I use him/him pronouns.

Demi Stratmon: Hi everyone. My name is Demi.

Mikaela Lefrak: [15:18] Demi is Demi Stratmon, a 22-year-old from DC. She told me last year during the summer before her senior year of college, she got really interested in the statehood campaign and even went on a lobbying trip to Iowa.

Demi Stratmon: [15:31] We went there. We had her on our little shirts and we just started talking to people. And it wasn't just the candidates. We would talk to people there, you know, local people from Iowa just explaining to them who we were, why we were here from D.C. and you know, what's going on in D.C.

Mikaela Lefrak: Her friend Jamal Holtz goes on the same kinds of trips. Holtz grew up wanting to be mayor of D.C. Now, he wants to be .

Jamal Holtz: [15:55] We're treated as second class citizens. To be frank, statehood is a civil rights issue.

Mikaela Lefrak: He says D.C. needs to do a better job at reaching people far away from the city. If statehood is going to pass, it'll be because people outside D.C. pressure their representatives about it.

Jamal Holtz: [16:11] One time I was in South Carolina having a conversation with the lady who lived there, born and raised, and she had no idea that D.C. wasn't a state. She became an advocate of D.C. statehood in South Carolina. She's talking to her family about it. She's talking to our neighbors about it. And she follows me on Facebook and always shares my stories when I'm talking about D.C. statehood. So that's the thing that is going to push the needle, many residents from across the nation to kind of help us push this message.

Mikaela Lefrak: [16:40] Back on that Zoom call, I listened as Stratmon explained how to talk to senators about statehood.

The participants were from all over the country, New Jersey to California.

Demi Stratmon: [16:49] When it comes to preparing to meet with actual elected offcials or their staff, frst, you have to be confdent to not feel like you are invading their space. They are your elected offcials. You have the right to speak with them.

Mikaela Lefrak: She didn't have to tell them that because she's from D.C., she has no senators to lobby herself. [17:11] After the break, we talked to people who don't think D.C. should be a state, who say the idea just doesn't hold water. We also talked to someone with an alternative plan.

David Krucoff: Retrocession is hands down way better.

Mikaela Lefrak: OK, that's after the break.

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Poncie Rutsch: [17:33] Hey, it's Poncie, senior producer for podcasts at WAMU. We've been hearing lately from listeners who really appreciate this deep dive into statehood from the What's With Washington podcast. And we're only able to do projects like this one because of support from listeners. If you're in a position to support this podcast, right now we have a special donation link just for you. You can get a pair of the What's With Washington argyle socks and specifcally show your support for 51st from What's With Washington. That's all at WAMU.org/SupportWhat'sWith. And, thanks!

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Mikaela Lefrak: [18:14] We're back, we've heard from a lot of people who support D.C. statehood, but it hasn't happened yet. So what's the problem now? There are a couple actually. The young advocates we heard from are out there trying to recruit representatives with actual votes in Congress onto team statehood and they get a lot of nos.

Sen. Tom Cotton: [18:32] Would you trust Mayor Bowser to keep Washington safe if she were given the powers of a governor? Would you trust Marion Barry? More important, should we risk the safety of our capital on such a gamble?

Mikaela Lefrak: [18:46] This is Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton. Every Washingtonian has heard some version of this argument which essentially says that D.C. can't handle its own affairs. You've heard it before on this podcast. In the 1960s, white Washingtonians argued new Black voters weren't smart enough to elect good city offcials. In the 1990s, Texas Congressman Tom DeLay was going on about D.C.'s hug-a-thug attitude. I'm going to let Tom Sherwood tackle this one. He walked us through the Marion Barry era in our last episode.

Tom Sherwood: [19:16] Well, if you can't be a state because of the misbehavior of executive leadership, Illinois would certainly have lost its statehood years, decades ago. I think four different governors have gone to jail in Illinois. Louisiana is a famous state for corruption, but no one says, well, you know, Louisiana hasn't really lived up to the ideals that we believe in, so let's take statehood away from Louisiana. It's only when people look at the District of Columbia do they fnd reasons not to allow us to have statehood.

Mikaela Lefrak: Thank you, Tom Sherwood. Next argument, please.

Sen. Tom Cotton: [19:54] But what vital industries would the new state of Washington represent? Lobbying? Bureaucracy? Give me a break.

Mikaela Lefrak: Tom Cotton again. He says D.C.'s economy is so dependent on the federal government that it shouldn't be a state. But that's just his opinion. Legally, you can't block a place from becoming a state because of what its industries are. But speaking of the law, the next argument is probably the thorniest. This time, we're hearing from Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana.

Sen. John Kennedy: [20:23] I think it's all about power, like everything else in Washington, D.C. Some say it would be unconstitutional. If you look at Article 1 of the Constitution. Mikaela Lefrak: [20:33] There are a lot of people like this. People who say D.C. statehood straight up isn't legal –not without signifcant changes to the Constitution, a.k.a. amendments. I talked about this with Roger Pilon, a leading constitutional scholar from the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank here in D.C. He's testifed about D.C. statehood before Congress.

Rep. Jody Hice: [20:54] Would the admission of the District of Columbia as a state require a constitutional amendment?

Roger Pilon: As I read the Constitution, it would.

Rep. Jody Hice: I read it exactly the same way you do. So does Congress have the authority to alter the status of the District through legislation?

Roger Pilon: No.

Mikaela Lefrak: [21:16] Basically, he says if D.C. wants to become a state, it's going to need an amendment on the part of the Constitution that establishes D.C., gives Congress the power to create a seat of government. Pilon says it does not give Congress the power to take that seat of government apart.

Roger Pilon: [21:32] The power that Congress has under Article 1, Section 8, Clause 17, the enclave clause, is the power to create this district in the frst place, which it exercised in 1790 and under which we live for the next 230 years.

Mikaela Lefrak: [21:50] Statehood advocates argue back, we're not getting rid of the federal city. We're just redrawing its boundaries so it's a whole lot smaller. Then the rest of D.C. can become a state in the exact same way that other states have, like Tennessee and Hawaii.

Pilon comes back and says, OK, well, if we manage to do that, you're also going to have to repeal the 23rd Amendment. That's the one that granted D.C. the right to vote for president and gives it three electoral votes. If you don't repeal that amendment, then this teeny tiny federal district would have three presidential electors and that would just be insane.

Mikaela Lefrak: [22:25] So even if the statehood bill passes, there are going to be the Pilons of the world waiting on the other side with legal challenges. Best to avoid the whole thing, they argue, choose a new path. So what does Pilon suggest for D.C.?

Roger Pilon: [22:39] They do have the advantage of being able to access any member of Congress that they wish. By access, I mean, they can go knock on the door of the people, for example, who are on the committee that oversees the District of Columbia.

Mikaela Lefrak: [23:00] Washingtonians should just be content with the fact that they could knock on the doors of senators and representatives since they live so close by and they shouldn't worry about getting a vote.

For everyone here who still wants an actual vote, Pilon says there's one other option.

Roger Pilon: [23:22] It would be easier for these proponents of D.C. statehood to turn to Maryland and ask Maryland to subsume the portion of D.C. that is basically residential into the state of Maryland. Why is it that they are taking that easier course?

David Krucoff: [23:40] Oh, this is exciting.

Mikaela Lefrak: This is David Krucoff. He's a D.C. native and the main force behind the idea of retrocession – merging D.C. back into the state of Maryland from whence it came. David Krucoff: Well, the technical name of the concept is retrocession, but we could also call it falling back or reunifcation.

Mikaela Lefrak: [23:58] Remember, the founding fathers made D.C. out of a chunk of Virginia and a chunk of Maryland. The Virginia chunk already retroceded in the mid-1980s. So instead of D.C. becoming the 51st state, Krucoff thinks it should be a new county in Maryland called Douglass County. Douglass, as in, Frederick Douglass.

David Krucoff: [24:14] The goal is voting rights. That's our goal. There are three ways that the residents of the District of Columbia can gain or complete voting rights. One is a constitutional amendment. I think that most people around the country understand what a constitutional amendment is and how diffcult it is. The second way is through a retrocession, which has happened before. And the third way is for D.C. to be a state itself.

Mikaela Lefrak: [24:43] Krucoff isn't against statehood, per say. He just thinks that it's so wildly unrealistic that it's not worth the battle. Instead, he thinks everyone should be working the kinks out of a plan to retrocede and rejoin Maryland.

David Krucoff: Retrocession is, hands down, way better. Way better.

Mikaela Lefrak: [25:01] Krucoff sees himself as an independent operator, a guy who's above party politics. And he's been pushing this idea for years, to the frustration of a lot of statehood advocates who say no one in D.C. wants this. But he won't stop. He's even running against D.C.'s delegate to Congress, Eleanor Holmes Norton.

David Krucoff: [25:19] Come on, tell me. Tell me, Mikaela, why do you think we should be the 51st state as opposed to being Douglass County, Maryland?

Mikaela Lefrak: I don't. I'm just a journalist.

David Krucoff: [25:30] OK, great. Great answer. Great answer. The usual thing would be to say we want our own senators. That's the usual answer. We don't necessarily deserve our own senators. This is not about "our" own senators. This is about senators, period. It's about us having senators, whether they're our own in our own city state or whether they're through a state.

Mikaela Lefrak: [25:50] Joining Maryland would get D.C. federal representation, he says. But, on the other hand, it would still mean getting subsumed by another state, one with its own laws and culture. Activists like Anise Jenkins say it's not enough to just have representation in Congress. It's important to them to still be Washingtonians. Some Marylanders are on board with the whole retrocession plan. I went on WAMU's Kojo Nnamdi Show and I can personally verify that a bunch of people from Maryland called in to talk about it.

Kojo Nnamdi: [26:21] Here's Marty in Bethesda. Marty, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

Marty: But residents of the District of Columbia, as they currently are, are just not capable of handling the responsibility of full management. And my view –while maybe unsatisfactory to your people, to many of your listenership– is shared by most members of Congress.

Another Caller: [26:47] Hey, thanks for taking my call. So, everybody's missing the big elephant in the room. D.C., if you look at the map, it used to be a diamond. And the Virginia side was taken back by Virginia. If it's going to be a state, it will be given back to Maryland. The land that D.C. has been given was from Maryland. If you want to be a state, you would have to fght to cede back to Maryland.

Kojo Nnamdi: Thank you for your call. Here's Howard expressing a similar sentiment in Oxon Hill, Maryland. Howard: [27:14] Non-federal property should be ceded to the state of Maryland. The people in D.C. will get two senators and probably a representative of their own. And this is much more easier to gain, I am convinced, than statehood. Thank you.

Kojo Nnamdi: Okay, thank you for your call.

Mikaela Lefrak: [27:32] Still, it doesn't seem like they're the majority. In a 2016 poll, only 28 percent of Marylanders supported retrocession and 44 percent were against it. Governor has stayed pretty quiet on the subject and only one congressperson from Maryland openly supports it, Andy Harris. He's also the state's only Republican congressperson.

Mayor Muriel Bowser: [27:53] Well, I don't support retrocession. And I don't think the people of Maryland do either. So it's kind of a dead issue.

Mikaela Lefrak: This is Muriel Bowser, D.C.'s current mayor and, of course, statehood advocate. I asked her to go hypothetical with me. What would the new state of Maryland look like if we did retrocede. For starters, it could make her a candidate for governor.

Mayor Muriel Bowser: [28:17] Very defnitely somebody in the District of Columbia would be the governor. I have no I have no doubt about that.

Mikaela Lefrak: Why?

Mayor Muriel Bowser: [28:26] I just think that if you combined D.C....D.C., Montgomery and Prince George's are very ideologically aligned and would become the economic engine of that state, I hesitate to say, because it's kind of funny to think about it. It would be a powerhouse.

Mikaela Lefrak: [28:52] Adding D.C. to Maryland would shift the state's whole power structure. She thinks Maryland isn't going to want this, ever. OK, so in her mind, retrocession is out. I asked Mayor Bowser if there's anything else she could compromise on. Any other way than statehood. And she said no. She doesn't know of any other way to get the representation and the autonomy that D.C. deserves.

Mayor Muriel Bowser: [29:13] We are living compromised right now. And so I don't really know what other thing to argue for. Just take it from me as a person who has to navigate all of these worlds, that having one out of 435 –one vote out of 435– is very different than two out of 102. And the things that get decided by only the Senate, where we're currently voiceless.

Mikaela Lefrak: [29:53] So here's Muriel Bowser's next move. She needs to bring attention to the city and start it down this path toward statehood that other now states have followed.

Mayor Muriel Bowser: [30:02] Specifcally, what were we going to do to be ready if, as I like to say, the political winds were all blowing in the right direction? I never wanted to be in the position as the leader of the District who wasn't ready. What does it mean to be ready? That means we have a contemporary vote of the people of the District of Columbia. So we took that vote in 2016...

Mikaela Lefrak: [30:25] In 2016, she calls for a referendum, a question on the ballot on the November 8th election. Yes, that election. And it showed that, yes, the majority of D.C. voters want statehood. More than 80 percent of Washingtonians who voted on D.C. statehood said yes.

[30:46]'s election that year deepened the partisan divide in our country. In a way, that helped the statehood cause. It's now a core part of the Democratic platform. Eleanor Holmes Norton's statehood bill passed the House this summer with overwhelming Democratic support. Only one Democrat in the House voted against it. Republicans in Congress are now pushing back. In early October, three Republican representatives introduced bills to block D.C. statehood, either by making D.C. part of Maryland or say new states can't have any more senators.

It's a real smorgasbord of ideas.

Bo Shuff: [31:18] My guess is that left hand didn't talk to right hand. There's 435 representatives. It's a big group of people and they don't necessarily always check with everybody. So that's my guess.

Mikaela Lefrak: Bo Shuff, executive director of perhaps the biggest D.C. statehood organization, DC Vote.

Bo Shuff: [31:34] If there was text behind it, we could probably examine if they had a difference of opinion on different things. But the fact of the matter is, is neither of those bills are going anywhere. And this is all performative introduction.

So I'm not sure they're super worried about it either.

Mikaela Lefrak: [31:48] Performative, in that they were introduced into the House of Representatives, which has already passed that statehood bill. These new bills are just dissenting congresspeople continuing to dissent. I actually talked to a congressman who introduced one of these bills, Dusty Johnson from South Dakota. I asked him, is D.C.'s situation a big policy priority or something for his constituents? And he said no. He said, and I'm quoting here, it's not one of the top two or three issues they talk about, for sure. But what he's trying to do is be part of this new strategy where Republicans push retrocession as a kind of moderate middle ground.

Bo Shuff: [32:26] The right, the opponents, are starting to freak out that we're going to win, right? They see that this conversation is happening and they're starting to get nervous that we are going to win, that statehood is going to happen. So they are trying to inject and put us back into a place of the center of fnding a compromise position, something that everybody might be able to feel OK about but isn't actually serving the needs of anybody.

Mikaela Lefrak: [32:58] Outside of party politics, away from Capitol Hill, there are people like Anise Jenkins.

Anise Jenkins: It's not a partisan effort. It's not to just get Democrats into offce. It's to get our civil rights, our basic rights, for representation for one man and woman, one vote – as part of the rights of D.C. residents. It's about getting my civil rights.

Mikaela Lefrak: [33:25] As different as they might seem, Jenkins has something in common with retrocession advocate David Krucoff and South Dakota Republican Dusty Johnson. They all know, in some way, shape or form, that D.C.'s current situation is inadequate. It cannot last.

Anise Jenkins: [33:41] How is this possible? And we want to change this situation.

Mikaela Lefrak: [33:46] Coming up on the next episode of 51st: weed, prisons and the ways some Washingtonians' lives have been completely reshaped because of congressional control.

[34:05] 51st is produced by me, Mikaela Lefrak, and senior producer Poncie Rutsch. Additional production comes from the WAMU podcast team, Ruth Tam, Patrick Fort and Jonquilyn Hill. Ben Privot mixed this episode. Our chief content offcer Monna Kashf oversees all the content we make at WAMU. If you're as excited to talk about D.C. statehood as we are, please write us a review or tell a friend about the show. We'll be back next week with another episode of 51st. Thanks for listening.