Go ahead, Democrats, make D.C. a state

[Bloomberg]( Follow Us [Get the newsletter]( Get Jonathan Bernstein’s newsletter every morning in your inbox. [Click here to subscribe](. The House of Representatives held a hearing this week on a proposal to give statehood to the District of Columbia. Democrats want to do that without a constitutional amendment, by making the part of the city where people live into a state while leaving the federal buildings and the national mall as the constitutionally required national capital. The hearing mainly demonstrated that there aren’t any serious arguments against the proposal other than partisanship. Indeed, the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake wrote a [column]( detailing some of the sillier Republican objections to statehood, and pointing out that many Republicans actually supported statehood not long ago. Blake missed the mark, though, when he wrote, “There are valid, philosophical reasons to argue that Washington, D.C., should not be a state or have voting rights in Congress.” But really, there aren’t. It’s pretty straightforward: Citizens in democracies get to vote and to be represented in the legislature. That’s it. Nothing complicated. No democracy scholar I’m aware of has ever advanced any argument that citizens should be disenfranchised if they live in a capital city. People who live in Phoenix and Albany and Sacramento are represented in their state legislatures (and in Congress). No one to my knowledge has ever suggested that they shouldn’t be, and if any state tried to take away their representatives, the courts would presumably toss the effort out. The Constitution’s framers just got this one wrong — presumably, at least in part, because they didn’t envision the capital as a significant city. It doesn’t matter why. We’ve corrected many mistakes in the original Constitution. There’s no good reason to defer to the framers on this one. If citizens in Washington deserve representation, the only real question is how to give it to them, and the only viable answer is statehood. Yes, returning the District to Maryland would also solve the problem, but it runs into the fact that Maryland doesn’t want it and the District doesn’t want to be part of Maryland. That leaves only statehood. Don’t even start with complaints that the new state would be too small; it wouldn’t have the lowest population currently, let alone historically. As for the compact geographical size, that’s basically irrelevant to the case for statehood. But there’s a strong case that a fully urban state would repair some of the damage caused by the malapportionment of the Senate, which has a strong rural bias. And no, this would certainly not be the first state created in part to help a political party; partisanship has always been involved in statehood politics. The only real argument against D.C. statehood is partisanship: Why should Republicans vote to create a state that would put two new Democrats in the Senate? And let’s not pretend that Republicans could simply shift toward the center to try to compete there; the Democratic advantage is far too lopsided for that. It’s a Democratic city and would be a Democratic state, and I can’t blame Republicans for voting their party’s self-interest. But the flip side of that is that Democrats can vote their own party’s self-interest — and, in this case, they would be on the side of democracy and justice. They should have done it in 2009 when they could defeat Senate filibusters; they should at least consider doing it now even if it forces them to limit the filibuster to get it done. And while they’re at it, they should do the same for Puerto Rico, where the partisan divisions are much less rigid. Assuming that citizens there want it. 1. Kelsy Kretschmer and Leah Ruppanner at the Monkey Cage on the effects of the pandemic on [political action by women](. 2. David Reich and Katie Windham make the [case for higher spending]( on regular federal government appropriations. 3. Nate Silver on [polling after 2020](. 4. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Ramesh Ponnuru on [Congress and war powers](. 5. And Nelson Lichtenstein on [Amazon and its workers](. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. [Click here to subscribe](. Also subscribe to [Bloomberg All Access]( and get much, much more. You’ll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close.  Before it’s here, it’s on the Bloomberg Terminal. Find out more about how the Terminal delivers information and analysis that financial professionals can’t find anywhere else. [Learn more](.  You received this message because you are subscribed to Bloomberg's Early Returns newsletter. [Unsubscribe]( | [Bloomberg.com]( | [Contact Us]( Bloomberg L.P. 731 Lexington, New York, NY, 10022