The District of Columbia was carved out of land given to the federal government by Virginia and Maryland. It was supposed to be a 100-square-mile diamond. Cartographers and Metro riders will notice those are not the dimensions of America’s capital city today.

The portion of the district that originally belonged to Virginia was retroceded to the commonwealth in 1847 after Alexandria voters “elected to leave D.C., feeling that they had been left out of development on the other side of the river,” according to Destination DC, a private tourism promotion organization.

Recommended Stories

• GOP grills 'sanctuary' governors in marathon House hearing: Five takeaways
• Cracks in Congress rupture with Padilla detainment, screaming matches, and interparty scraps
• Here are the spending cuts in the rescissions bill passed by the House

Now, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), who lives in Takoma Park, a neighborhood that overlaps parts of Maryland and the district, has suggested that Congress should retrocede most of the rest of the district to Maryland.

Raskin is pitching retrocession as a way for district residents to escape the rule of President Donald Trump.

“I saw Mayor [Muriel] Bowser and I said, ‘If you guys want to think about coming back to Maryland for this period, you will definitely be safer in this free state than you will be under the brutal thumb of MAGA colonialism,’” Raskin said on the City Cast DC podcast.

The framing is probably too clever to gain approval, either from the Republican-controlled Congress or, more importantly, from district voters, many of whom are indignant about the more than $1 billion in spending cuts the federal government is forcing on the local government.

“700,000 Washingtonians proudly govern our own affairs,” Bowser clapped back, in a statement to the Washington-based WUSA9 News.

District residents overwhelmingly favor statehood. They voted for it in a 2016 referendum, with an 86% majority. Their license plates read, “Taxation without representation.”

Raskin’s proposal has thus been met by locals with some mockery, that they don’t want to become “Maryland drivers,” for instance, and the more serious observation that their taxes might actually go up in such a move.

With this in mind, Raskin has hinted that it could be a backdoor way to statehood: retrocession now with statehood possible at a later time, in a post-Trump era when his party again controls Congress.

For all the pushback, if district residents sincerely want a voice in Congress that can cast actual votes any time soon, retrocession is probably their best bet.

At last count, there were just over 678,000 district residents. The average congressional district contains about 100,000 more people. Any new redrawing of the lines would likely include all of the district and carve into Maryland a bit.

Ironically, there’s a decent chance that Raskin himself could end up living within that new district. To represent his new home turf, he would likely have to fight Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), the district’s elected but nonvoting delegate to Congress, for the prize.

Redrawing of state boundaries is a difficult political feat, of course, but there is historical precedent for it. Vermont was originally part of New York, Maine was hived off from Massachusetts, Tennessee was the western part of North Carolina, Kentucky and West Virginia were originally Virginia territory, and the Virginia part of the district boomeranged back.

There is also a current push for redrawing state boundaries by voters across the country who, unlike Maryland or district voters, are overwhelmingly Republican.

The movement is called Greater Idaho. It would see the annexation of all the counties in Eastern Oregon by the state’s next-door neighbor.

“Counties can become a part of Idaho,” the Greater Idaho website reads. “State lines have been relocated many times in American history because it just takes an interstate compact between two state legislatures and approval of Congress.”

The shift is necessary because “the Oregon/Idaho line was established 163 years ago and is now outdated,” Greater Idaho argues. “It makes no sense in its current location because it doesn’t match the location of the cultural divide in Oregon.”

Voters of both Washington and Oregon voted to change the state boundary lines to address the issue of the wandering Columbia River in 1958, not so very long ago, Greater Idaho proponents like to point out.

ROUGHLY 700 MARINES DEPLOYING TO LA FOLLOWING WEEKEND ICE PROTESTS

So far, over about four years, voters in 13 counties in eastern Oregon, close to a clean sweep, have passed referendums in support of joining Idaho. The Idaho legislature has also voted to encourage merger talks.

This year, several state senators from eastern Oregon, buried deep in the legislative minority, agitated for hearings on it in the Oregon state capital of Salem.

Jeremy Lott is the author of The Warm Bucket Brigade: The Story of the American Vice Presidency.