How Moderate Senate Democrats Enabled Trump’s D.C. Takeover

Many have warned that allowing D.C. to remain a disenfranchised colony would lead to disaster. They were right.

President Trump’s military occupation of Washington, D.C., is based on outrageous lies. It is also already causing chaos, with one District vehicle already totaled when it was T-boned by an MRAP truck. (The driver was not seriously injured, thankfully.) The fact that huge mine-resistant vehicles are being driven aimlessly around a city that is notably not littered with IEDs tends to indicate that their presence is meant for intimidation, as the same kind of vehicle was used during South African apartheid.

I suspect this is a trial run for a classic coup d’état, where the military seizes control of the legislature and other important buildings, and declares Trump dictator-for-life. Whether that would work is an open question. But it is clear that a handful of moderate Senate Democrats, by refusing to end the filibuster and grant statehood to D.C., paved the road down which Trump is now driving armored vehicles.

For many years now, I have been one among many arguing that D.C. should become a state. The arguments are obvious: As the District’s license plates sarcastically point out (“Taxation Without Representation,” they note), there are about 700,000 American citizens living there who have no representation in Congress. That is an outrageous violation of the principles that underlay the founding of this country. American citizens should have representation in their own government. (The same is true of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.)

D.C. statehood would also reduce the partisan bias of the Senate. On its face, the Senate is a ludicrously unfair institution that grants unjustifiable overrepresentation to randomly depopulated states—Wyoming residents count about 70 times as much as Californians—but for much of American history that was counterbalanced by small states not having a reliable partisan bias. That is no longer true: The median Senate seat is slanted about three points to the GOP, and for much of recent history Republicans have controlled the chamber despite losing the majority of votes for senators. Two more reliable Democratic senators would reduce that structural unfairness.

There is a more practical factor, however, that is arguably most important of all. States possess wide powers over their own budgets and laws, and enjoy certain restrictions on presidential powers to federalize their National Guard troops. Federalizing police is not allowed at all.