Many have warned that allowing D.C. to remain a disenfranchised colony would lead to disaster. They were right.
BY RYAN COOPER
AUGUST 22, 2025 (Prospect.org)
BRYAN OLIN DOZIER/NURPHOTO VIA AP
National Guard troops patrol outside of Union Station in Washington, August 20, 2025.
President Trump’s military occupation of Washington, D.C., is based on outrageous lies. It is also already causing chaos, with one District vehicle already totaled when it was T-boned by an MRAP truck. (The driver was not seriously injured, thankfully.) The fact that huge mine-resistant vehicles are being driven aimlessly around a city that is notably not littered with IEDs tends to indicate that their presence is meant for intimidation, as the same kind of vehicle was used during South African apartheid.
I suspect this is a trial run for a classic coup d’état, where the military seizes control of the legislature and other important buildings, and declares Trump dictator-for-life. Whether that would work is an open question. But it is clear that a handful of moderate Senate Democrats, by refusing to end the filibuster and grant statehood to D.C., paved the road down which Trump is now driving armored vehicles.
For many years now, I have been one among many arguing that D.C. should become a state. The arguments are obvious: As the District’s license plates sarcastically point out (“Taxation Without Representation,” they note), there are about 700,000 American citizens living there who have no representation in Congress. That is an outrageous violation of the principles that underlay the founding of this country. American citizens should have representation in their own government. (The same is true of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.)
D.C. statehood would also reduce the partisan bias of the Senate. On its face, the Senate is a ludicrously unfair institution that grants unjustifiable overrepresentation to randomly depopulated states—Wyoming residents count about 70 times as much as Californians—but for much of American history that was counterbalanced by small states not having a reliable partisan bias. That is no longer true: The median Senate seat is slanted about three points to the GOP, and for much of recent history Republicans have controlled the chamber despite losing the majority of votes for senators. Two more reliable Democratic senators would reduce that structural unfairness.
There is a more practical factor, however, that is arguably most important of all. States possess wide powers over their own budgets and laws, and enjoy certain restrictions on presidential powers to federalize their National Guard troops. Federalizing police is not allowed at all.
As a colony, by contrast, D.C. is directly at the mercy of Congress, as I personally experienced in 2014 when Republicans overruled my vote (and that of my fellow D.C. residents) to legalize recreational marijuana. D.C. control over its own affairs is formally outlined by the Home Rule Act of 1973, which give the president direct control over the D.C. National Guard, allows him to federalize the local police for up to 30 days on his own word (and indefinitely if Congress votes to allow it), along with numerous other petty restrictions. Even that control is not enough for Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN), who have proposed a new law granting Trump even more sweeping powers.
Back in 2019 and again in 2021, House Democrats did pass a sweeping voting rights reform, the For the People Act, which included a ban on gerrymandering and D.C. statehood. Republicans obviously filibustered it, and in the latter case when Dems controlled the Senate, then-Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) refused to consider filibuster reform, so it died.
I won’t rehash the arguments about the stinking, rotten filibuster—an “institution” based on a clerical error, used to block civil rights bills for most of American history, which has caused grave damage to both houses of Congress, and in its current form dates back to about 2007—in too much detail. Suffice to say that moderate Democrats’ pigheaded refusal to end this fake tradition is a big reason why we are in this mess.
If Democrats had axed the filibuster—which could be accomplished with a majority vote in the Senate at any time—and passed the For the People Act in 2021, Trump would now find it considerably more difficult to impose a military occupation on the nation’s capital, and Republican states would face an obstacle to cheating elections by rigging district boundaries. Democrats also would have had 52 votes in 2021-2022 rather than 50, and President Biden’s Build Back Better Act likely would have passed instead of dying in the Senate. Had Biden’s massive expansion of the Child Tax Credit passed, Trump might not have won in 2024.
All that is water under the bridge. But it is an important lesson about the stakes for any future Democratic Congress and president. If they do manage to stop Trump’s attempt to consolidate a dictatorship, America’s political institutions will need a major overhaul. Manchin and Sinema are both gone, but their brand of “moderation”—some mixture of triangulating cynicism, corruption, and cowardice—is not. Supporting D.C. statehood is the bare minimum for any Democrat seeking a Senate seat.
RYAN COOPER
Ryan Cooper is a senior editor at the Prospect, and author of ‘How Are You Going to Pay for That?: Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question in Politics.’ He was previously a national correspondent for The Week.
