A
Anonymous
Guest
House Seat for D.C. to be Debated by Senate Next Week
A bill to give D.C. a full seat in the House of Representative may clear Congress this session. Generally, Democrats are for it (because D.C. is full of Democrats) Howeverand Republicans are against it (because D.C. is full of Democrats)., to make the bill more palatable to Republicans, it would increase the House from 435 members to 437 members, with the other seat going to the state that came closest in 2000 to getting another representative. That state is Utah, where the Republicans control the state machinery and can gerrymander the districts to make sure the new representative is a Republican. If the bill passes both houses of Congress and is signed by President Obama, it becomes law. No changes to the constitution are required. Congress has changed the size of the House many times in history as the nation grew.
Giving D.C. senators is a different story altogether. The constitution says clearly that each state gets two senators and this bill would not make D.C. a state. Making it a state would require only an act of Congress (which happened when Alaska and Hawaii) were admitted to the union), but Republicans would filibuster it to death because it would virtually guarantee two more Democratic senators. Other proposals to give the residents of D.C. representation in the Senate, such as making it part of Maryland, are nonstarters. (Making it part of Virginia would be even worse for the Republicans since it would change Virginia from a state trending blue to a permanently deep blue state; adding it to Maryland would change little.) Conceivably Republicans could accept making D.C. part of Utah, but Democrats would probably balk at that. If the Democrats were ever to achieve 60 votes in the Senate, actually admitting D.C. to the union as a state would probably be on the agenda. By way of analogy, the the European Union's executive branch (the European Commission) is in Belgium and the European Parliament meets in France for several sessions a year, although it also conducts some of its business in Brussels. The Secretariat is in Luxembourg. Neither is in some special no-man's land not part of any country.