Former Chairman of the District of Columbia Democratic Party Scott Bolden debated Fox News employee Lisa Boothe about the legitimacy, constitutionality and partisan politics behind the Democrats’ new bill to make Washington, DC the 51st state.
Boothe and Bolden joined “ The Story ” Monday, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., Del Legislative. Eleanor Holmes Norton, DD.C., hailed to make the District of Columbia a state of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth. “
The new name is said to be a nod to black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, a Republican who named then-President Rutherford Birchard Hayes the first Black US Marshal for the District of Columbia in 1877.
Pelosi said the residents of the district “pay taxes, fight in our wars and contribute to our country’s economic power,” but are collectively disenfranchised.
On “The Story,” Bolden repeated to the House Speaker, saying that Holmes Norton’s bill would release “700,000 people who have no vote in the Senate or the House.”
He accused Republicans of opposing the right to vote as a habit, calling a state “the right thing to do,” adding that DC has more of a tax base than Vermont and Wyoming combined, but no vote in Congress.
Holmes Norton, in office since 1991, is allowed committee vote, but not final vote on legislation – similar to other House Representatives in Guam, Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands.
“It’s taxation without representation, in its purest form,” said Bolden, echoing the District’s popular slogan on DC license plates.
Boothe fired back that DC Statehood is a simple “power grab of the left”.
“Jamie Raskin gave up the game when he said the Senate was the main obstacle to social progress,” she said of the Maryland Democratic congressman whose district borders Northwest DC.
Hostess Martha MacCallum noted that almost every US Attorney General except Eric Holder was wary of the state, and James Madison wrote specifically in the Federalist Papers about a federal “independent seat of government” separate from the other states.
“So why does it make sense to change that now?” she asked. “If the District of Columbia was overwhelmingly red (Republican), based on everything you said about the need for representation, would you join this program right now and push for two more Republican senators from the District of Columbia?” she asked.
Bolden called this a “loaded question” and Boothe replied that “no one believes” that a state is about fairness.
She pointed out that President Biden received 93% of the vote in Washington, and no Republican president has ever broken 20% there, except Richard Nixon.
“They know there would be forever two democratic seats that would change the balance of power forever,” she said.
“ Instead of following the rules and honoring the small amount of control given them in the House and Senate, they want to blow up the whole system; blowing up the standards. [and] trying to get a state to DC possibly Puerto Rico by wrapping up the Supreme Court and also nationalizing and federalizing elections and getting rid of voter IDs [to] make it easier to cheat. “
“So this is what Democrats want to do, because all the Democratic Party or the current Democratic Party cares about is power. They will do whatever they need to do to achieve and expand it,” Boothe concluded.
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Since its founding, the major change in the District of Columbia representation has been the 1847 retrocession from what is now Arlington County, Virginia, and the city of Alexandria, Virginia, back to the Commonwealth of Virginia.
The portion ceded of what was once Maryland, along with Lady Bird Johnson Island, is what remains of the original District of Columbia.