The House briefly interrupted into chaos Thursday morning after Rep. Mondaire Jones, a New York Democrat, went after Republicans for their ‘racist’ arguments against D.C. statehood, as the House’s vote on the statehood vote neared.
‘One Senate Republican, said that D.C. wouldn’t be a “well rounded working class state.” I had no ideas there were so many syllables in the word white,’ the freshman New Yorker said.
‘One of my House Republican colleagues said that D.C. shouldn’t be a state because the District doesn’t have a landfill,’ he continued. ‘My goodness, with all the racist trash my colleagues have brought to this debate I can see why they’re worried about having a place to put it.
Rep. Mondaire Jones sparked fury on the House floor when he said the reason why GOP lawmakers were so concerned with D.C. having is landfill was because they needed a place to put ‘all the racist trash my colleagues have brought to this debate’
Rep. Louie Gohmert, who had just delivered his own floor speech, against D.C. statehood could be heard shouting over Jones, as Republican asked that the comments be struck from the record.
Jones agreed – but then continued, saying the Repulicans’ ‘desperate objections are about fear.’
‘If they don’t rig our democracy they will not win,’ he said. ‘Today Democrats are standing up for a multi-racial democracy.’
On Thursday the House will vote for the second time in under a year to make Washington, the District of Columbia a state – Washington, Douglass Commonwealth, composed of most of D.C.’s current territory, with a federal district around the White House, National Mall and Capitol kept out.
While Democrats, en masse, argued for giving the 712,000 residents of D.C. respresentation, Republicans shared a number of ideas of how to fix the problem without adding what would almost certainly be two Democratic senators and one Democratic representative to Congress.
Rep. Dusty Johnson, a South Dakota Republican, pitched retrocession – essentially making the neighborhood portions of D.C. a part of Maryland again.
‘If your goal is truly suffrage let’s do this together,’ he pitched to his Democratic colleagues across the aisle.
Gohmert, a Texas Republican, pointed to a bill he’s sponsored in the past that would remedy the issue of ‘taxation without representation,’ by allowing District residents to not pay federal taxes.
He said Democrats haven’t joined the effort becuase they’d rather gain the new members of their party in Congress.
Rep. Andy Harris, a Republican from Maryland, said that turning D.C. into a state wasn’t what his state intended.
‘This is Maryland’s land we’re talking about. How dare the Congress take Maryland’s land from it,’ he said on the House floor.
House Minority Whip Steve Scalise sent out a memo arguing against D.C. statehood – due to the city’s crime, budget and history of crooks – on the eve of the House’s D.C. statehood vote, a second in under a year
A Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police car sits outside an apartment building in the Carver-Langston neighborhood in Northeast D.C. last May, as an uptick in violence rattled the neighborhood with crime increasing by 40 per cent compared to 2019 figures
Republicans have made a number of arguments against residents of D.C. (pictured: the city’s Chinatown neighborhood) getting representation in Congress, including that the city doesn’t have any mines or a landfill and wrongly claiming there are no car dealerships
On the eve of the vote, the House’s No. 2 Republican, Rep. Steve Scalise, pointed to the District of Columbia’s uptick in crime in just the latest GOP argument against giving the capital city statehood.
‘Why should the District of Columbia be granted statehood when it can’t even perform basic governmental duties like protecting its residents against criminals?’ Scalise asked in an anti-statehood memo his office put out, first obtained by Forbes.
The document also focuses on D.C.’s budget and history of crooked officials.
Crime is up in the District, though that’s a national trend, which could be impacted by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
The crime rate is much lower than it was in the 1990s.
Scalise also used a ’90s figure, the late Mayor Marion Barry, as evidence of D.C. government mismanagement and corruption.
Things have gotten much better in recent years. The city government had a half a billion dollar surplus in fiscal year 2020, a New York Magazine story on Scalise’s comments pointed out, calling his reasoning ‘ignorant’ and ‘racist.’
In September, the House voted 232-180 approving D.C. statehood, sending the bill to the U.S. Senate where it died in the last Congress.
Not a single House Republican voted in favor of the legislation.
Republicans have come up with a laundry list of reasons for why a jurisdiction of more than 700,000 people – a higher population than Wyoming and Vermont – deserves zero respresentation in Congress.
Last month during a House Oversight Hearing on the legislation, GOP lawmakers suggested D.C. shouldn’t be a state because it doesn’t have a landfill – as Jones pointed out Thursday – mines or a car dealership.
‘D.C. would be the only state, the only state, without an airport, without a car dealership, without a capital city, without a landfill, without even a name on its own, and we could go on and on and on,’ argued Rep. Jody Hice, a Georgia Republican.
There are several car dealerships in D.C.
Rep. Glenn Grothman, a Wisconsin Republican, asked D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser about the District’s manufacturing, agriculture, mining and drilling, arguing ‘those are things that I think every state has to some degree.’
‘We do not have any mines, congressman,’ Bowser replied.
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser testified before a House Oversight Committee hearing in March about making the District a state. Republicans peppered the mayor with questions and pointed out the city doesn’t have a landfill, mines or a car dealership, although it has several
Rep. James Comer, a Kentucky Republican and the committee’s ranking member, argued that D.C. statewood was a ‘key part of the radical leftist agenda to reshape America, along with the Green New Deal, defunding the police and packing the U.S. Supreme Court.
Comer also called the bill ‘flatly unconstitutional.’
Bowser said anti-statehood arguments have usually come as ‘thinly veiled attacks on our political leandings and, quite frankly, on our diversity and history of black political power.’
She urged lawmakers to ‘move beyond the tired, non-factual and frankly anti-democratic rhetoric and extend full democracy to the residents of the District of Columbia.’
She also argued that the disenfranchisement has persisted because of the ‘racist efforts to subvert a growing and thriving black city,’ pointing to the Congressional record where white representatives refererred to it as the ‘negro problem.’
If D.C. was given statehood, the current political demographics of the city would almost certainly mean that two Democratic senators would be added to the body as well as a Democratic House member.
