WASHINGTON, June 26 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. House of Representatives on Friday approved a legislation granting statehood to Washington, D.C. for the first time on Capitol Hill, a largely symbolic move since the White House and Republicans who control the Senate have already voiced their opposition.
The bill was passed on a highly partisan vote of 232-180 in the Democrats-led House. Only one Democrat voted against it and all House Republicans opposed it. Independent lawmaker Justin Amash of Michigan also voted no.
"People in the District of Columbia pay taxes, fight our wars, risk their lives for our democracy. And yet ... they have no vote in the House or the Senate about whether we go to war, and how those taxes are exacted and how this is all played," Speaker Nancy Pelosi said hours before the vote.
"We're at a state of compromise, and we think it's very long overdue," Pelosi said.
Maxine Waters, a Democratic lawmaker from California, said D.C.'s lack of full representation is a racial injustice since the U.S. capital city has a significant African American population.
"More than 46 percent of its 700,000 residents are black," Waters said of Washington D.C.
"Make no mistake, race underlies every argument against D.C. statehood, and denying its citizens equal participation and representation is a racial, democratic and economic injustice, we cannot tolerate," Waters was quoted by a Fox News report as saying.
Meanwhile, Republicans slammed the Democrats' effort as a Democratic Party power grab in a presidential election year, citing the lopsided partisan leanings of D.C. residents.
"This is about power. Make no mistake about it," said Republican lawmaker Chip Roy, noting the bill would "fundamentally alter what D.C. is."
"What this is really all about is an attempt to get two more Democratic senators," Georgia Republican Representative Jody Hice claimed.
"D.C. is not prepared -- financially and otherwise," Hice said, questioning whether the U.S. capital was even capable of self-governance.
The critics also contend that D.C. statehood is unconstitutional, arguing that the nation's founders established the city as a neutral zone to govern outside the influence of state politics. Granting D.C. statehood would require a constitutional amendment, they say.
Introduced by D.C.'s nonvoting House member Eleanor Holmes Norton, the bill would shrink the country's capital city to a small area encompassing the White House, Capitol buildings, Supreme Court, and other federal buildings along the National Mall, local media reported.
The rest of the city would become the 51st U.S. state, named the Washington, Douglass Commonwealth after abolitionist Frederick Douglass, according to the bill.
With the statehood, the bill would grant D.C. two senators and make the existing sole House representative a voting member.
However, the bill is presumed dead on arrival in the Republican-led Senate and President Donald Trump has said he would veto the bill if it came to his desk.
"D.C. will never be a state," Trump said in an interview with the New York Post in May.
By passing the bill granting D.C. statehood months before the November elections, Democrats are hoping to highlight their legislative priorities for voters to see, a The Hill report said.
The death of black man George Floyd in police custody a month ago has prompted weeks of protests and civil unrest across the country, unloosing a flood of pressure on Congress to tackle racism and thus giving new life to a host of years-old proposals designed, at least in part, to empower African Americans and other minorities, said the report.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and also known as D.C. or Washington, was founded in 1791 after the American Revolution as the seat of the federal government of the newly independent country under the Residence Act signed into law in 1790. The U.S. Constitution provided for a federal district under the exclusive jurisdiction of the U.S. Congress, and the district is therefore not a part of any U.S. state.
As of June 2019, D.C. had more than 705,000 residents, making it the 20th most populous city in the U.S., data from the U.S. Census Bureau showed.
The figure surpasses the populations of western state Wyoming and northeastern state Vermont. Furthermore, commuters from the surrounding Maryland and Virginia suburbs raise the city's daytime population to more than 1 million during the workweek, according to local media reports. Enditem
