Point of View: Making the District of Columbia a state is a step in the wrong direction

One fallout from recent incidents of police violence against minority citizens has been a protest movement calling for police reform and action to reduce society’s racial inequities. In turn, the protest movement has reinvigorated calls for the District of Columbia to be made a state – so that the District’s largely minority population would have fully empowered representatives in both houses of Congress, rather than their non-voting delegate in the House of Representatives.

The District’s residents do deserve better representation, but that does not mean that the District should become our 51st state, as proposed in the Washington, D.C. Admissions Act of 2020. The Democratic majority House passed the act in late June, undoubtedly influenced by the tendency of District residents to vote Democratic. Republicans control the Senate, read the tea leaves the same way as the Democrats, and consequently have blocked the legislation. Republicans might lose their Senate majority in the November elections and, if they do, it is a good bet that the act will become law in 2021. A good bet, but a bad outcome.

Advocates of D.C. statehood correctly assert that there are already six states with fewer people than the District: Vermont, Wyoming, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Delaware. But the mere existence of six very lightly populated states is not grounds for adding another.

Lightly populated states already punch too far above their weight in Washington thanks to the Constitution’s allocation of two Senators to each state – regardless of how many people live in them.

This Constitutional provision was a compromise the framers devised to entice small states to join the nascent union by giving them enough power in the Senate to prevent big states from calling all the shots. Clearly, no longer a relevant concern.

While the framers were framing, the most heavily populated state was Virginia. In 1790, the Old Dominion State had about 12 times the population of the least populated state (Delaware) and roughly 9 times the population of second least populated (Vermont). Today, the disparity between the most and least populated states is vastly greater. Far greater than the framers could ever have imagined. Indeed, far greater than they would have thought healthy for a democratic republic.

California’s population is almost 64 times Vermont’s and 57 times the District’s level of about 705,000.

California even has four cities with substantially more residents than the District. For that matter, Jacksonville’s population is almost 25% larger than the District’s. The population of Texas is 41 times greater than the District’s and Florida 30 times.

The six states with the smallest populations collectively hold 12% of the seats in the Senate, but altogether account for only 1.4% of the national population. If the District were to become a state, the disproportion would get even worse: 14% of Senate seats would be held by states that account for a scant 1.6% of the population. 1.6% is a smaller than the sampling error in statistics about the populations the size of our nation.

Making the District a state will add to the perception that Washington and particularly the Senate is disconnected from the people. That important decisions too often reflect the interests of the few. Congress should, instead, explore ways of allowing District residents to be represented by a neighboring state. For example, by giving District residents the right to vote as Marylanders in Congressional elections, increasing the size Maryland’s delegation in the House of Representatives to reflect the District’s 705,000 voters, and leaving the Senate as is.

JIM MISKEL, VERO BEACH

Editor's note: Miskel is a former professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.