page_title: Statehood movement in the District of Columbia
section_title: 1980s–2015
hierarchical_section_title: Statehood movement in the District of Columbia / History / 1980s–2015
caption_attribution_description: English: Second inauguration of Barack Obama
context_page_description: The District of Columbia statehood movement is a political movement that advocates making the District of Columbia a U.S. state. The District of Columbia is a federal district under the direct jurisdiction of the United States Congress. Unlike nearly all other states and territories that contain multiple cities, the District of Columbia only contains one, having subsumed the formerly separate municipality of Georgetown. Statehood would grant the District voting representation in the Congress and full control over local affairs. For most of the modern statehood movement, the new state's name would have been "New Columbia", although the Washington, D.C. Admission Act of 2020 refers to the proposed state as "Douglass Commonwealth."
  Statehood for the District, which is also known as District of Columbia, might be achieved by an act of Congress, under the power granted to Congress by the United States Constitution to admit new states to the Union. However, there is some debate as to whether simple legislation would be sufficient to grant statehood to District of Columbia, which is the seat of the United States federal government.
context_section_description: Before the failure of the DC Voting Rights Amendment, but when passage seemed unlikely, District voters finally began to pursue statehood. In 1980, District voters approved the call of a constitutional convention to draft a proposed state constitution, just as U.S. territories had done prior to their admission as states. The convention was held in February through April 1982. The proposed constitution was ratified by District voters in 1982 for a new state to be called "New Columbia". In 1987, another state constitution was drafted, which again referred to the proposed state as New Columbia. Since the 98th Congress, more than a dozen statehood bills have been introduced, with two bills being reported out of the committee of jurisdictions. The second of these bills made it to the House floor in November 1993, for the only floor debate and vote on D.C. statehood. It was defeated in the House of Representatives by a vote of 277 to 153.
  Pursuant to the 1980 proposed state constitution, the District still selects members of a shadow congressional delegation, consisting of two shadow Senators and a shadow Representative, to lobby the Congress to grant statehood. These positions are not officially recognized by the Congress. Additionally, until May 2008, the Congress prohibited the District from spending any funds on lobbying for voting representation or statehood.
  Since the 1993 vote, bills to grant statehood to the District have been introduced in Congress each year but have not been brought to a vote. Following a 2012 statehood referendum in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, political commentators endorsed the idea of admitting both the District and Puerto Rico into the Union.
  In July 2014, President Barack Obama became the second sitting president, after Bill Clinton in 1993, to endorse statehood for the District of Columbia. In a town-hall event, he said "I'm for it." He added that "folks in D.C. pay taxes like everybody else, they contribute to the overall well being of the country like everybody else, they should be treated like everybody else," Obama said in response to a question. "There has been a long movement to get D.C. statehood and I've been for it for quite some time. The politics of it end up being difficult to get through Congress, but I think it's absolutely the right thing to do." D.C. residents now pay more in taxes than 22 states.
  For more than 20 years following the 1993 floor vote, there were no congressional hearings on D.C. Statehood. But on September 15, 2014, the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs held a hearing on bill S. 132, which would have created a new state out of the current District of Columbia, similar to the 1993 bill.
  On December 4, 2015, the District of Columbia was granted membership in the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization, an advocacy group for people groups and territories which do not receive full representation in the government of the state they reside in.
caption: DC Statehood Now! flag at Inauguration 2013
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