Getting statehood, or at least voting rights, has driven HBO’s “Last Week Tonight” host John Oliver to song.
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And though the District’s Congressional representative, Eleanor Holmes Norton, has repeatedly tried to fight for the region’s statehood, she ultimately has what Oliver summed up as “pretend power, like a child watching Dora the Explorer“. From 1998 to 2007, Congress banned the city from using its own tax dollars to enact the program, which was meant to reduce the spread of HIV. Among the problems plaguing the nation’s capital in the last few decades have been its lack of voting rights in presidential elections until 1964, Congress’ general control over the District of Columbia, and more troubling signs of its lack of individual power. When Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD) placed a rider into an omnibus spending bill last December, Harris told Politico, “If they [D.C. residents] don’t like that oversight, move outside of the federal district to one of the 50 states that is not covered by the jurisdiction of Congress as a whole.” Del.
“In 2009, a bill to give D.C. a vote was introduced in the Senate, and the Senate did the most d***ish thing imaginable”.
“All the rest of us can choose a path / That we think is best / But any choice that D.C. makes / Is easily suppressed”.
That addition was an amendment that would have repealed all gun-control laws in the city. (It’s happened with drug laws, abortion and guns.).
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