The Democrats have a problem.  Despite controlling the White House, the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, they don’t have enough votes to enact the most radical items on their socialist agenda.  To deal with this inconvenience, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer have devised a two-pronged scheme that will help Democrats cling to power and make it easier to pass their left-wing legislative wish list.

The first part of the plan is to enact H.R. 1, a bill that would federalize our electoral system, make mail-in voting universal, and destroy important election integrity safeguards.  H.R. 1 passed the House by a party line vote in March and is currently moving through the process in the Senate. 

The second part of the devious strategy is to make the District of Columbia our 51st state.  If the measure gets through Congress – it passed the House recently by a straight party line vote of 216-208 – President Biden has indicated he would sign it into law.  Thankfully Democrat Senator Joe Manchin came out against making D.C. a state through simple legislation.  Manchin recently stated, “If Congress wants to make D.C. a state, it should propose a constitutional amendment…and let the people of America vote.”

If D.C. were admitted into the union, it would get to elect two United States Senators and just like that, the deadlocked 50 – 50 Senate would become a more comfortable 52 – 50 Democrat majority.  Moderate Democrat Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema would no longer be a thorn in Majority Leader Schumer’s side, since the District of Columbia would definitely elect extreme leftist Senators who would be a rubberstamp for the socialist Green New Deal agenda.  Why beg Manchin and Sinema for their votes, if you can get to a simple majority without them in a new 102 member Senate?   

Furthermore, longtime D.C. Delegate to Congress Eleanor Holmes-Norton would likely become the new state’s first U.S. Representative, giving Nancy Pelosi a critical extra vote on the House floor.  As a Delegate, Holmes-Norton can currently vote only in committee – and with a scant 218- 212 majority another reliable Democrat vote is not insignificant to Pelosi. 

The overwhelmingly liberal District of Columbia would also elect a Democrat Governor and a Democrat-controlled state legislature equipped with a supermajority in the state senate which would allow left-wing Democrats to dramatically transform the nation’s capital that Americans have grown accustomed to. 

The last two states to join the United States were Alaska and Hawaii in 1959.  At the height of the Cold War, the strategic importance of these states joining the union is obvious and in the U.S. Senate there was strong bipartisan consensus on this point.  The vote to admit Alaska into the union was 64 – 20; Hawaii 76 – 15.  Conversely, the District of Columbia becoming a state is only of strategic importance to Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and the wishes of their liberal megadonors. 

A Rasmussen poll conducted earlier this year found that only 29 percent of those surveyed support D.C. statehood and a whopping 55 percent opposed the idea.  D.C. statehood isn’t a pressing issue for the American people; no national candidate ran on D.C. statehood; and there’s absolutely no mandate for such a radical move at a time when we’re so divided as a country.  In fact, it’s an irresponsible power grab.

The issue of D.C. statehood is not new to the political arena.  In 1993 a vote on statehood for the District of Columbia failed 277 – 153 in the Democrat-controlled U.S. House with 105 Democrats voting against the measure.  The difference in 2021 is that today’s Democrat Party has been completely radicalized and the mainstream media is no longer a skeptical watchdog, but rather an accomplice to the left’s unhinged actions.  The Biden-Pelosi-Schumer Democrat Party is concerned about power first and last; what is right and wrong never enters into the equation.  Last year, a D.C. statehood bill passed the House in what was essentially a party line vote and went nowhere in the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate. 

To that point, 22 state attorneys general recently penned a letter stating Congress doesn’t have “the authority to create an entirely new state out of the District” and vowed to fight it in the courts if President Biden were to sign the bill into law.  The AGs argue that D.C. can only become a state through a constitutional amendment since it was created by the U.S. Constitution. 

One thing is abundantly clear.  Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi don’t care about Washington, D.C. residents having full representation in Congress.  Their real concern is getting more dependable liberal votes in their pockets to make it easier to fundamentally transform our Constitutional Republic into their warped Orwellian socialist utopia.   

If Democrats manage to ram D.C. statehood into reality, they should think about what conservative states could be established the next time Republicans control all the levers of power.  “East Dakota” and “West Dakota” – for example – would give Republicans four more conservative Senators to pass their agenda.  And why stop there?  Thankfully, D.C. statehood faces an uphill climb in the U.S. Senate.  Hopefully sanity prevails in the long run in the upper chamber.  

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