Washington DC tries to become a State of the Union again | International

“Do you mean to say that the District of Columbia is a State? Why? So that Democrats can have two more senators and five congressmen? No thanks. It will never happen. ” The quote is from United States President Donald Trump, to your city newspaper, The New York Post, last May, when asked his opinion that the capital of the United States will no longer have the status of District to become the 51st State of the Union. The House of Representatives of the Congress of the United States, of a Democratic majority, will live a historic day this Friday when it approves the legislation that would give the possibility that the more than 700,000 inhabitants of the D.C. have representation and vote on Capitol Hill. The only problem with that victory is that this will be his entire journey.

From the White House, which let it be known last Wednesday that if there were to be a law on the president’s table to be signed that would grant the status of State to the District of Columbia, it would be vetoed, up to the necessary 60 votes to avoid filibusterism in the Senate, all steps following the one taken in the House are doomed to failure.

The leader of the Republican majority in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, has been clear about it: if the bill reaches the Upper House, it would not consider it for a vote. South Carolina Republican Senator Mike Rounds expressed the same sentiment by declaring that “the Founding Fathers were right and were very clear about shutting out the District of Columbia.” “I don’t see a vote in the Senate,” said Rounds.

The last time the proposal for DC (short for the acronym for the District of Columbia) to become a state was voted in the House was in 1993 and it failed by 277 votes to 153 (it only had one vote). republican in favor). Back then, the District suffered from a high crime rate and was on the verge of bankruptcy.

The scenario to achieve the desired category of State and that the motto that the license plates of cars wear is a thing of the past (“Taxation Without Representation”, “Taxes without representation” in Spanish, because federal taxes are paid but there are no representatives in the Congress with the right to vote) is now very different. House Democrats and other political figures, such as city Mayor Muriel Bowser, renewed a fight that seemed anesthetized after Trump decided to deploy the National Guard to crush the civil protest after the death in police custody of the afroamericano George Floyd.

With military helicopters flying over the streets of the city last May, the mayor of the city decided that the time had come to give a new push to statehood. “What this president has done is something that has never happened before, federal troops, the FBI [la policía federal], National Guard brought from other parts of the country patrolling the streets of Washington, ”said Bowser, who assured that it was at that moment that he was aware that a new assault had to be attempted to abandon the District status.

The fact that the District of Columbia is not a State means that it does not have a governor, it lacks representation in the Senate and it only has one figure – without a vote – in the House. This figure is the representative Eleanor Holmes Norton, who defends the statehood of the capital of the nation since she came to office in 1991. The law that she herself has promoted – HR 51 – has 226 supports in the House – more than enough to pass the vote – and 40 in the Senate. “My great-grandfather Richard Holmes escaped slavery from a plantation in Virginia and made his way to DC, a whole path to freedom but not equal rights,” Norton said. “For three generations, my family has been denied the rights that other Americans take for granted,” the representative concluded.

The Speaker of the House, Democrat Nancy Pelosi, He declared this week that it was an injustice that District citizens “pay taxes, serve their country in the Army, and contribute to the country’s economy” while being denied basic rights, such as voting on Capitol Hill. For Republicans, creating a new state would violate Amendment 23 of the Constitution, which in 1961 established that the District of Columbia was the seat of government. In his opinion, moreover, DC is not prepared to assume the responsibilities that come with holding state status.

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