To achieve that, you would need to abolish the Senate altogether, since it affects how people are governed, yet gives citizens from various states vastly different voting powers. Even with Senate representation, where in the US people live determines their ability to influence the composure of the Senate and thus which kinds of bills can pass Congress and which ones dont. The very idea of the Senate violates this principle that you want to use to justify DC statehood.

Let's get to the crux of it all: the Senate giving disproportionate power to the smaller states was a deliberate choice, a necessary concession to get the smaller states to ratify the Constitution. Without this concession, there would not have been "United States" of America to begin with. This skew of the Senate is a huge strategic long-term problem for Democrats/liberalism, which is why they try to come up with ideas like DC statehood to make up their structural deficit in the chamber. You're not fooling anyone when you pretend to be oh-so concerned for the democratic representation of the people in DC - your true motivation is razing the biggest roadblock for the lefty agenda.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jan 10 2021 11:20pm

what a load of bullcrap. sure, the level of representation is very uneven (and for the record, a compromise to achieve a certain goal, made a couple of hundred years ago, is no justification to uphold an injustice. that's a terrible line of argument, even if you glorify the people who made that deal whenever it suits your agenda), but you're once again strawmanning hard: you had to change my point from 'same rights' to 'exact equal weight' in order to make your dishonest little pivot there - and as you should be well aware, i'd actually be in favour of the latter - just refer to our discussions about the EC for example. one step at a time though.

the simple truth is: there is a much larger (not just in terms of practical impact, but from a legal, moral, and philosophical standpoint) injustice that so many people have absolutely NO representation in the senate whatsoever, through no fault of their own.

btw, for someone who loves to lecture about history so much, your knowledge about the DC statehood discussion is incredibly flawed and limited - you should definitely read a little more about it, because your blatant projections about partisan motivations can be easily refuted by looking at the long history of that debate - not that it was an even remotely valid reason to begin with, since, AGAIN, partisan motivation is neither a legitimate argument FOR nor AGAINST statehood / representation. the core issue is if you support the same rights to determine how you're governed for everyone, or not.

i do. you don't. so your silly assumptions about my 'agenda' are not just dead wrong, but more importantly, irrelevant to the people that are affected by it, and overwhelmingly demand for senate representation. it's amazing that you just can't seem to make that very basic distinction, lol.

While the arguments for DC statehood may have historical legitimacy, I think it would be difficult to achieve it politically. Support for statehood is pretty unpopular and it would be seen as a blatantly partisan act. I think that it will take several years to get enough support.

I've already said it before: if your only concern genuinely was the lack of Senate representation of the residents of DC, this could easily be solved by splitting up a deep-red state (say Oklahoma or Tennessee) at the same time, so that the balance of power in the Senate is not affected by DC statehood. I wonder if Democrats would still be willing to spend political capital on such a bill because they just care that much about DC residents...

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jan 11 2021 01:15am

I wouldn't be opposed to that because that's how most states ended up being formed anyway. Maybe we can shave off some of California and Oregon to create "Jefferson." Washington and Jefferson would be great.

DC statehood would introduce new problems, not the least that a single state would control access to government. Proposals have been made to carve out the Capitol as an enclave to work around that, but at that point, we may as well just reintegrate DC back into Maryland.

We have enough small states as is. We can't go around revoking statehood for Wyoming and RI, but we don't need to add to the problem.

It'd be no different than Northern Virginia tbh. They'd carve out a tiny portion of DC and have that run by the feds. The rest of DC would just be a city-state.

and i've stated before that i would not be opposed to that - if it resolved an issue of representation there for example, and the people of that state wanted it. you, however, have proven that your ONLY concern is the short term electoral impact which, AGAIN, is not a legitimate reason to withhold representation from that many people.

Which defeats the purpose, because a few buildings run by the feds does not give the federal government the autonomy envisioned.

Even were we to dispense with that, though, there's no reason not to simply reintegrate them as part of a surrounding state. There's no need for another tiny state.

Puerto Rico has a much better claim.