I’m opposed to DC statehood (NOT representation, that’s different) on the grounds that if we start letting random cities and tracts of land join as a state there will be no end to the lunacy of just adding new states to eliminate political opposition.
DC should join either Maryland or Virginia. The people there deserve representation like any other US citizen but the capital city of the country is not a state in and of itself. There’s no remotely comparable example of a tiny municipality just deciding that it was a full fledged state, and breaking precedent sets up a massive can of worms for blatantly partisan reasons.
My personal preference is to add it to Virginia since it’ll do Dems more good there than as part of Maryland, but I don’t think it’ll matter much in 10-15 years anyway.
Any you know, there are more people than Wyoming and DC has a larger GDP than 16 other states, the only measure by which it’s tiny is number of trees and lawns.
None of that addresses why we should break precedent and make a literal city-state, something we’ve never done before. There’s literally no reason to do that rather than add it to an existing state outside of partisan concerns.
Similarly, there’s no reason to disenfranchise it outside of partisan concerns.
DC is basically just a partisan brute force battle. One day Dems will have a large enough majority and they’ll just force it through, and in response the next time the GOP has a large majority they’ll split Idaho or something. It’ll be the dumbest partisan food fight yet that helps nobody and it’d be infinitely better for the people of the United States to just circumvent that and enfranchise DC in a way that doesn’t break from the central meaning of a state since the inception of this country - as a territory that is governed by a centrally located state government, meant to be able to function as a separate independent body but also as one part of a whole nation.
