The Washington D.C. Admission Act will be introduced today in the House of Representatives. Monica Hopkins, Executive Director of the ACLU of the District of Columbia, issued the following statement:
"There are nearly 700,000 people living in the District of Columbia today with no voting representation in the U.S. Congress. The ACLU of the District of Columbia strongly supports the Washington, D.C. Admission Act that will be introduced today by Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton.
“The majority of D.C. residents are Black and brown people who have been denied a voting voice in Congress for more than 200 years. The District of Columbia is the only national capital in the democratic world whose citizens do not have equal voting and representation rights. The only way to correct this deep injustice and ensure equal rights for the people of D.C. is through granting statehood to the District.”
The legislation is constitutional, would grant statehood to the District of Columbia as the 51st state, and would provide District residents with the congressional representation of two senators and one voting member of the House of Representatives. The legislation would also transform the office of the mayor to the office of the governor, and the D.C. Council would become the new legislative assembly. The new state would be called the State of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth.
Read our testimony regarding D.C. Statehood’s constitutionality at dcstatehoodnow.org/constitutionality/.
