D.C. mayor calls for citywide vote to make nation’s capital the 51st state

D.C. mayor calls for citywide vote to make nation’s capital the 51st state

D.C. Ambassador Muriel E. Bowser on Friday alleged for a citywide vote in November to accomplish the nation’s basic the 51st state, resurrecting a decades-old plan to put the affair afore Congress and to accession acquaintance beyond the country about District residents’ abridgement of abounding citizenship.

“I adduce we yield addition adventurous footfall against capitalism in the District of Columbia,” Bowser told a breakfast of hundreds of city-limits residents, Democratic associates of Congress and civilian rights leaders appearance the city’s ceremony of capitalism from slavery.

“It’s traveling to crave that we forward a adventurous bulletin to the Congress and the blow of the country, that we appeal not alone a vote in the House of Representatives. We appeal two senators — the abounding rights of citizenship in this abundant nation,” Bowser said.

The mayor’s advertisement could decidedly admission astriction amid the city’s Democratic majority and a Republican-controlled Congress.

The District is already arduous Congress over its ascendancy to accept bounded city-limits spending. Bowser and the D.C. Council this year plan to advance with assuming a bounded spending plan — accretion $13 billion — after aldermanic allotment for the aboriginal time back the nation’s founding.

Aides to Bowser said a broader advance for statehood would chase a action accepted as the “Tennessee model.” If Tennessee was accepted to the abutment as the 16th state, it was a federal territory, abundant like the nation’s capital. Congress agreed to acquiesce Tennessee to become a accompaniment after acceptance by the absolute states. Instead, it appropriate a vote of association in the area to accept a accompaniment architecture and a agreement to anatomy a republic-style government.

Bowser’s administering has been alive to amend a architecture accustomed by D.C. voters in 1982 for just such a state. That petition, submitted by then-Mayor Marion Barry, was abandoned by Congress.

As Bowser spoke, hundreds of advocates for statehood were accession on Freedom Plaza for a demonstration, and Bowser said she believes the time is accomplished for a new effort.

She said there is a accepted abuse in Washington, in which residents’ “Zip code” cuts them off from accepting a say in Congress over how city-limits residents’ federal taxes are spent and whether the nation should go to war or affirm a new amends to the Supreme Court.

Bowser declared a babe in one of the city’s atomic neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River. “When she prepares to vote if she turns 18, she will not accept the appropriate to vote for senator,” Bowser said. “But if she confused just one mile away, she would accept representation and she would accept two senators. But by active in D.C., those rights are baseborn from her.”

The ambassador alleged on the nation to attending at D.C. statehood not as a accessory affair that could angle the antithesis of ability against Democrats but as “an American issue.”

“Some in Congress say . . . the acumen why D.C. association can’t accept abounding admission to the authorization is because of too abounding Democrats,” Bowser said. “Can you accept that? Do you anticipate admission to capitalism is a Democratic or Republican issue? No, it’s an American issue.”

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