Statehood for the District of Columbia

Floor Speech

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Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate this time on the House floor this evening because there has been a historic development in the District of Columbia. Today, a new group called Statehood Yes announced what amounts to bipartisan support for D.C. statehood.

The fact is that the Republican Party of the District of Columbia had not always--in fact, had not been officially a part of the statehood movement, which is not to say that some Republicans have not been for D.C. statehood.

But today was very different. Today, a D.C. resident, George Vradenburg, a philanthropist in our city, a long-term resident, and a former AOL executive, announced that he was chairing a campaign that is part of the effort of the District of Columbia to achieve statehood. That effort is being led by the Mayor and the City Council who, earlier this year, launched what is called the Tennessee Plan.

The Tennessee Plan is simply a shorthand way to get statehood. The way in which my statehood bill operates is that, yes, the House and the Senate would vote for statehood, and it would then ask the city to submit a constitution and do what is necessary to become a State.

The Tennessee plan simply reverses that process. It does what Tennessee did. What Tennessee did was what the District is in the process of doing. What Tennessee did was to present a constitution to the people to be ratified. And when it had done all of the preliminaries, preliminaries that are often done after the statehood vote, they simply came to the Congress and said: Approve us for admission to the State. And, indeed, that is exactly what the Congress did 200 years ago.

The District is trying to imitate that approach to statehood. In order to do so, there needs to be a vote. You are not going to get statehood if you don't want it. So as part of the democratic process, the District would have to vote on whether or not it wants statehood. That is what the Statehood Yes campaign is trying to facilitate as part of what is required by the Tennessee plan.

What this means is--much like the State of Tennessee, it was a Federal territory at the time--this bill would be submitted to the President after the House and the Senate had voted for D.C. statehood if the voters answered four questions.

What are these questions?

First, the voters will have to answer yes or no whether the District should become a State.

Second, the District will have to answer whether voters, those of us who live in the District and vote in the District, approve of a constitution. That constitution is being adopted as I speak by the Council of the District of Columbia.

Third, the voters will have to approve the proposed boundaries for the State. That is important since the Federal sector would continue to exist. That Federal sector would be the areas where The Mall and monuments and other Federal buildings are now located. The new State would be the neighborhoods of the District of Columbia.

And the fourth question the voters will be asked to approve is whether they pledge to support an elected representative form of government.

I was very pleased to hear Mr. Vradenburg speak today at Busboys and Poets, one of our local meeting places, about why he supports D.C. statehood and why he has taken on this effort to be the chairman. Among the things he discussed, of course, is how he intends, with the effort of Statehood Yes, to reach out to all parts of the country.

The District recognizes that, in spite of this bipartisan support in the District of Columbia, statehood remains an uphill climb.

What important change in our country has not been an uphill climb?

We are undaunted by that prospect.

We recognize that the Republican Party nationally has certainly not been supportive of D.C. statehood. At its convention this year, the Republicans did not include language supporting D.C. statehood. In fact, there was language that appeared to oppose D.C. statehood.

But at that time we did not have what we apparently have today, and that is the official support of the Republican Party of the District of Columbia. That official support could not be more important. Present at the Statehood Yes announcement today was Patrick Mara, the Executive Director of the Republican Party of the District of Columbia.

This bipartisanship is minimally necessary for us to move forward; just as we recognize we will have to work with Republicans here in the Congress in order to get the same rights they have.

District of Columbia residents are number one per capita, first in taxes paid to support the government of the United States, and yet, the City's budget comes here every year. It is a local budget. That is money, $4 billion, raised in the District of Columbia. I am sure my colleagues would tear their hair out, Republican and Democrat, if their local budget had to come here.

The reason the District has moved to statehood is that there is no other way to achieve equality as American citizens except as a new State.

Today's effort came as every Member of this House is running for office. As I thought about what this first bipartisan effort, the first thought that crossed my mind was that D.C. is running for statehood. It is going to the people and saying: We can't move forward with the effort the Congresswoman has made, or with this effort through the Tennessee Plan, a shorthand way to get statehood, but one that has been used by other States, unless D.C. wants statehood.

So in D.C. that is like second nature.

Why would you ask somebody if they wanted statehood?

We all know the answer, but getting an official answer, an answer through a vote, is very different from answer, an answer through a vote, is very different from everyone understanding that nobody would choose to have Congress in your local business if you had a choice, particularly a Congress which has shown for a number of years now that it can't even run itself, much less try to have anything to do with running a District of almost 700,000 American citizens.

So, yes, we do need a strong vote from residents to move forward with statehood. I am not at all concerned about that vote. A poll showed that more than three-quarters--that is a poll that was taken by one of our newspapers, The Washington Post--support D.C. statehood.

You can be assured that the District is--those who are working as part of the Tennessee Plan for the necessary vote--are trying to get an even bigger vote than that. We haven't had a vote for statehood now for decades. This is an entirely new effort on the part of the City.

In fact, the best expression of where the residents stand on statehood came about 4 years ago when we had our first official Senate hearing on statehood. Now, I knew there would be some residents who came. What I did not anticipate is that they would come in such large numbers that, after the standing-room-only room where the hearing was being held was filled, the Senate would have to open up other rooms in order to accommodate all the residents. So they have voted. They have voted with their feet.

What the District wants now and what Statehood Yes is trying its very best to get is an official recognition, an official voice from the residents of whether they want statehood or not. And the best way to get that is the way they began today, with bipartisan support, with an AOL executive who lives in the District chairing the effort to get that vote.

D.C. showed up. They showed up in record numbers when the question was: Do you want to listen to the first official hearing in the Senate on D.C. voting rights--sorry--on D.C. statehood?

I am glad I mentioned D.C. voting rights there because the District didn't come to statehood easily. When Tom Davis--Representative Tom Davis, who decided several years ago to retire from the Congress--was here, he approached me about a bipartisan effort to get a vote, just a vote, in the people's House. Tom, a Republican, had been in the Republican leadership. He was in the majority. He and I worked together on what was really an important effort.

Utah had just missed getting the vote. Utah may be the most Republican State in the union, and the reason it missed getting the vote was heartbreaking. Its young people fan out every year to other countries as part of their missionary work. In past eras, those missionaries had been counted in the way they must because they have to come home after 2 years.

For some reason they weren't counted, and Utah went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, but did not prevail. So it was quite a bipartisan effort. I remember working not only with the Utah delegation, but with the Governor of the State and with the House and the Senate of that State, who approved that bipartisan effort to achieve a House vote for D.C. residents and a House vote for Utah.

That effort succeeded in the House and the Senate at a time when the Democrats controlled both parties. What kept it from fruition is also heartbreaking, and that is that there was a rider from the National Rifle Association attached that, in essence, said, yes, you can give D.C. a Member of Congress if--if--the District eliminates all of its gun safety laws. That is an offer that had to be refused. It was a cynical offer.

How can you be in the Nation's Capital and not have strong gun safety laws? Not only do 700,000 of us live here, but the most controversial figures in the world come here. Heads of state frequent our streets and our restaurants. They come by in caravans of cars every day. So it was an offer that had to be refused.

But it does show that the District has tried to find incremental ways to statehood and been rebuffed. Even as I speak, there is a new and important effort going on; and that is the District has moved, pursuant to a budget autonomy referendum, to manage its own budget without coming to the House of Representatives or the Senate.

For this referendum, The District was sued. It lost in the U.S. district court and went to the court of appeals. As someone who practiced constitutional law, I can tell you I had never seen what resulted. The U.S. court of appeals eliminated--the District Court decision, and submitted the issue of the constitutionality and the legality of budget autonomy to the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. The Superior Court of the District of Columbia held that the District's budget autonomy referendum is valid. So, the irony is that the only court decision upholds budget autonomy for the District.

Understand what we mean by that. It is the same autonomy that every Member here not only cherishes, but insists upon. It is your own money. It has nothing to do with this House, which contributes nothing. The only thing the House contributes to the District of Columbia is what it contributes to everybody else. It doesn't give us a thing. Yet if you go out in the streets of the District of Columbia, you should be envious of what we have done with our economy because what you will see is building going on everywhere. People are moving into the District, not moving out.

We know how to support ourselves. We have got more than $2 billion in surplus funds. How many Members of this House can boast that? So you can see how we object to those who dare tell us how to run our city, particularly as we see this House floundering on the Zika virus, a health emergency, and we still can't get it done. D.C. doesn't have that kind of problem. We can govern ourself without interference by others.

The District is particularly to be complimented on this longer effort to achieve D.C. statehood. It has been going on now for the better part of 6 months. Too often the city and its residents have grown angry when Congress did something to our city. There was an arrest led by the former Mayor when he was Mayor and members of the council when there was an attachment to our budget after we had gotten every single rider or attachment removed that had been undemocratically attached by this House. People were arrested.

But the problem with that approach is not that civil disobedience is not to be expected when somebody takes away rights that every American citizen should have. The problem with it is you can't wait for the Congress to do something really horrendous to you and then say that we are now in the mode to get our rights. It has to be a sustained effort. What the District is doing now as it tries to use the Tennessee Plan to get statehood is part of a sustained effort.

Today I called for a yearlong plan after that because I do not suffer the illusion that a House that can't pass a Zika virus is going to reach into its long lost democratic treasure house and give the District statehood, but I do certainly believe that it won't happen unless you have the kind of effort that is going on now. What the District is doing in its effort to achieve statehood, using the Tennessee Plan with the bipartisan effort announced today, to me, is particularly noteworthy.

When I come to the House floor, as I often do, as I am this evening, to speak about statehood, you are within your rights to say: Says who? My answer to that--when the vote comes in in November, with this question on the ballot answered by the residents of the District of Columbia, I will be able to say: Says who? Says the American citizens who live in your Nation's Capital, who also happen to pay the highest taxes per capita in the United States of America; that is who. That is what I was will say.

I say to my Republican friends in the District of Columbia, you have sent a worthy signal to this House that bipartisanship for D.C. statehood begins in the District of Columbia, and now it must be taken up by both parties in the House and Senate as well.

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