President Donald Trump’s crime crackdown in Washington, D.C., has renewed calls from Democrats to make the district a state. This position has been and remains nothing more than an attempted power grab that cannot be allowed to happen.
Washington, D.C., is unfit to be a state for various reasons. For one, it is nothing more than a city, and not a particularly large one. It has a smaller population than 21 other cities, and as a state, it would be 15 times smaller in terms of area than the smallest state, Rhode Island.
Recommended Stories
- Why the Left won’t stop targeting the Little Sisters of the Poor
- Trump is right to treat the Epstein files as a distraction
- Europe should not abandon monitoring in Armenia
The district is also unfit to become a state because it has proven incapable of full self-governance. Washington, D.C., Democrats passed a law to weaken criminal penalties for carjackings, robberies, and homicides at a time when it was dealing with a crime surge. The absurd move made a Democrat-majority Senate relent to a House Republican push to repeal it, with then-President Joe Biden signing off. Washington, D.C., has continued to go soft on juvenile carjackers, which is why it’s in the midst of a crisis that brought on Trump’s intervention.
The goal of Washington, D.C., statehood has been, and remains, gifting the Democratic Party two free senators. The district backed former Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election 90%-6%. That 84-point margin was nearly double that of the next least competitive state, with Wyoming backing Trump by a 46-point margin. The largest share of the district’s vote that a Republican ever won was 21% by former President Richard Nixon in his 1972 landslide victory. For comparison, that record high for a Republican is still 11 points less than Trump won last year in his worst-performing state, Vermont, where he won 32% of the vote.
HE ATTACKED ME ON A BUSY DC STREET. THE POLICE TOLD ME TO MAKE A CITIZEN’S ARREST
Such a move would require a constitutional amendment, which Democrats even acknowledged in their 2021 statehood push. That means Democrats want to amend the Constitution to admit into the union a “state” the size of a city that refuses to jail criminals, giving that state full control of the land around Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court. They would do that at the same time as they whip up mobs of activists to harass their political opposition. What could go wrong?
The Washington, D.C., statehood push is a political sham. It is the Democrats’ attempt to stack the political deck in their favor, and it should not, and will not, ever be successful.