Dems' bid to make DC the 51st US state dealt crushing blow after Senator Joe Manchin announces he WON'T support his party's bill
A long-shot bid to pass legislation that would make the District of Columbia the nation´s 51st state got a little longer on Friday.
Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia said that he opposes unilateral action by Congress to make the nation's capital a state. Manchin says he believes any such move needs to be done through a constitutional amendment.
The Senator also highlighted how prior Republican and Democratic administrations thought the same thing.
Manchin is the first Democratic senator to come out against the D.C. statehood bill while Republicans are united against it.
Although there is support for the bill among Democrats in the Senate, the bill will not succeed without Manchin's support in the Senate.
The legislative filibuster requires 60 votes to pass the legislation. Currently, Democrats hold 48 Senate seats, with America's two independent senators siding with them on votes. Republicans have 50 seats, with Vice President Kamala holding a tie-breaker vote.
'They all came to the same conclusion. If Congress wants to make D.C. a state, it should propose a constitutional amendment,' Manchin said in an interview with the West Virginia MetroNews radio network. 'It should propose a constitutional amendment and let the people of America vote.'
Sen. Joe Manchin said Friday that he does not support the D.C. statehood bill
A map provided by the D.C. government shows how the city would be divided into Washington, Douglass Commonwealth, with the red area - that includes the White House, Capitol, many federal agencies and the National Mall - staying under federal control
Earlier this month, the House approved a bill strictly along party lines to make the District of Columbia a state with one representative and two senators, while a tiny sliver of land including the White House, the U.S. Capitol and the National Mall would remain a federal district.
An identical statehood bill passed the House in 2020, but it died in the then-Republican-controlled Senate. Now, with the 2020 elections having given Democrats control of both chambers of Congress and the White House, some have been pushing to eliminate the filibuster so that only a simple majority in the Senate would be needed to get legislation passed.
The D.C. statehood bid would be one of the initiatives that could conceivably pass under such a scenario.
Still, such a tactic would require total Democratic unity, and Friday´s radio interview with Manchin demonstrated anew that they don´t have it.
In a party-line vote last week, House Democrats passed H.R. 51 which would make Washington, D.C. the country's 51st state, solving the problem of around 712,000 Americans having no representation in the U.S. Congress
Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., is the first Democratic senator to come out against DC statehood bill snd it will not succeed without Manchin's support
A Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police car sits outside an apartment building in the Carver-Langston neighborhood in Northeast D.C. last May
Manchin has also stated unequivocally that he will not vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster, which allows senators opposed to a bill to stage a debate on it until its allocated time runs out. He is among a handful of Democratic senators who have not openly supported the D.C. statehood initiative.
Republicans argued during the House vote that the measure wouldn´t withstand judicial scrutiny. Manchin said he would 'tell his friends' that if they pursued statehood through legislation, 'you know it´s going to go to the Supreme Court.'
'Every legal scholar has told us that, so why not do it the right way and let the people vote and see if they want a change,' Manchin said.
Such an amendment would not go up for an election. Rather, a proposed amendment to the Constitution would have to be approved by a two-thirds majority of both chambers of Congress, and then legislatures in 38 states must ratify the language adopted by Congress in order for the amendment to become valid.
D.C. has long chafed under its relationship with Congress, which has the power to essentially veto or alter any local laws. Its population is larger than that of Wyoming or Vermont and its estimated 690,000 residents pay federal taxes, vote for president and serve in the armed forces, but they have no voting representation in Congress.
Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia´s nonvoting member of Congress, did not mention Manchin by name in a statement her office released Friday. But it was clearly intended as a rebuttal to his comments.
'First, no new state was admitted by constitutional amendment,' Norton said. 'All 37 new states were admitted by Congress, and there has never been a successful constitutional challenge to the admission of a state. The Constitution commits admission decisions solely to Congress.'
Campbell Wallace, a spokesperson for Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., and sponsor of the Senate's statehood bill, said the Constitution does not prohibit the granting of statehood to Washington, D.C. It does lay out the process by which states are admitted, though, 'and D.C. is now taking those same steps that 37 other states have taken since 1791.'
Prior to last weeks House vote, Democratic Rep. Mondaire Jones sparked fury on the floor by calling Republican arguments against statehood 'racist trash,' as D.C. is a majority-minority city.
'One Senate Republican, said that D.C. wouldn't be a 'well rounded working class state.' I had no ideas there were so many syllables in the word white,' the freshman New Yorker said.
'One of my House Republican colleagues said that D.C. shouldn't be a state because the District doesn't have a landfill,' he continued. 'My goodness, with all the racist trash my colleagues have brought to this debate I can see why they're worried about having a place to put it.'
Rep. Andy Harris, a Republican from Maryland, said that turning D.C. into a state wasn't what his state intended.
'This is Maryland's land we're talking about. How dare the Congress take Maryland's land from it,' he said on the House floor.
Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina, also said the vote was linked to the progressive's 'wish list' stemming from Biden's $2trillion infrastructure plan and new climate policies.
'This is not about a balance of power, this is about more power,' she said. 'This is about government-run health care, a 93 trillion [dollar] Green New Deal, packing the Supreme Court, higher taxes and a bigger, less efficient form of government.'
In June, the House voted 232-180 approving D.C. statehood, sending the bill to the U.S. Senate where it died in the last Congress.
Not a single House Republican voted in favor of the legislation.
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