[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 9]
[House]
[Pages 11981-11983]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                 STATEHOOD FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Jody B. Hice of Georgia). Under the 
Speaker's announced policy of January 6, 2015, the Chair recognizes the 
gentlewoman from the District of Columbia (Ms. Norton) for 30 minutes.
  Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate this time on the House floor 
this evening because there has been a historic development in the 
District of Columbia. Today, a new group called Statehood Yes announced 
what amounts to bipartisan support for D.C. statehood.
  The fact is that the Republican Party of the District of Columbia had 
not always--in fact, had not been officially a part of the statehood 
movement, which is not to say that some Republicans have not been for 
D.C. statehood.
  But today was very different. Today, a D.C. resident, George 
Vradenburg, a philanthropist in our city, a long-term resident, and a 
former AOL executive, announced that he was chairing a campaign that is 
part of the effort of the District of Columbia to achieve statehood. 
That effort is being led by the Mayor and the City Council who, earlier 
this year, launched what is called the Tennessee Plan.
  The Tennessee Plan is simply a shorthand way to get statehood. The 
way in which my statehood bill operates is that, yes, the House and the 
Senate would vote for statehood, and it would then ask the city to 
submit a constitution and do what is necessary to become a State.
  The Tennessee plan simply reverses that process. It does what 
Tennessee did. What Tennessee did was what the District is in the 
process of doing. What Tennessee did was to present a constitution to 
the people to be ratified. And when it had done all of the 
preliminaries, preliminaries that are often done after the statehood 
vote, they simply came to the Congress and said: Approve us for 
admission to the

[[Page 11982]]

State. And, indeed, that is exactly what the Congress did 200 years 
ago.
  The District is trying to imitate that approach to statehood. In 
order to do so, there needs to be a vote. You are not going to get 
statehood if you don't want it. So as part of the democratic process, 
the District would have to vote on whether or not it wants statehood. 
That is what the Statehood Yes campaign is trying to facilitate as part 
of what is required by the Tennessee plan.
  What this means is--much like the State of Tennessee, it was a 
Federal territory at the time--this bill would be submitted to the 
President after the House and the Senate had voted for D.C. statehood 
if the voters answered four questions.
  What are these questions?
  First, the voters will have to answer yes or no whether the District 
should become a State.
  Second, the District will have to answer whether voters, those of us 
who live in the District and vote in the District, approve of a 
constitution. That constitution is being adopted as I speak by the 
Council of the District of Columbia.
  Third, the voters will have to approve the proposed boundaries for 
the State. That is important since the Federal sector would continue to 
exist. That Federal sector would be the areas where The Mall and 
monuments and other Federal buildings are now located. The new State 
would be the neighborhoods of the District of Columbia.
  And the fourth question the voters will be asked to approve is 
whether they pledge to support an elected representative form of 
government.
  I was very pleased to hear Mr. Vradenburg speak today at Busboys and 
Poets, one of our local meeting places, about why he supports D.C. 
statehood and why he has taken on this effort to be the chairman. Among 
the things he discussed, of course, is how he intends, with the effort 
of Statehood Yes, to reach out to all parts of the country.
  The District recognizes that, in spite of this bipartisan support in 
the District of Columbia, statehood remains an uphill climb.
  What important change in our country has not been an uphill climb?
  We are undaunted by that prospect.
  We recognize that the Republican Party nationally has certainly not 
been supportive of D.C. statehood. At its convention this year, the 
Republicans did not include language supporting D.C. statehood. In 
fact, there was language that appeared to oppose D.C. statehood.
  But at that time we did not have what we apparently have today, and 
that is the official support of the Republican Party of the District of 
Columbia. That official support could not be more important. Present at 
the Statehood Yes announcement today was Patrick Mara, the Executive 
Director of the Republican Party of the District of Columbia.
  This bipartisanship is minimally necessary for us to move forward; 
just as we recognize we will have to work with Republicans here in the 
Congress in order to get the same rights they have.
  District of Columbia residents are number one per capita, first in 
taxes paid to support the government of the United States, and yet, the 
City's budget comes here every year. It is a local budget. That is 
money, $4 billion, raised in the District of Columbia. I am sure my 
colleagues would tear their hair out, Republican and Democrat, if their 
local budget had to come here.
  The reason the District has moved to statehood is that there is no 
other way to achieve equality as American citizens except as a new 
State.
  Today's effort came as every Member of this House is running for 
office. As I thought about what this first bipartisan effort, the first 
thought that crossed my mind was that D.C. is running for statehood. It 
is going to the people and saying: We can't move forward with the 
effort the Congresswoman has made, or with this effort through the 
Tennessee Plan, a shorthand way to get statehood, but one that has been 
used by other States, unless D.C. wants statehood.
  So in D.C. that is like second nature.
  Why would you ask somebody if they wanted statehood?
  We all know the answer, but getting an official answer, an answer 
through a vote, is very different from answer, an answer through a 
vote, is very different from everyone understanding that nobody would 
choose to have Congress in your local business if you had a choice, 
particularly a Congress which has shown for a number of years now that 
it can't even run itself, much less try to have anything to do with 
running a District of almost 700,000 American citizens.
  So, yes, we do need a strong vote from residents to move forward with 
statehood. I am not at all concerned about that vote. A poll showed 
that more than three-quarters--that is a poll that was taken by one of 
our newspapers, The Washington Post--support D.C. statehood.
  You can be assured that the District is--those who are working as 
part of the Tennessee Plan for the necessary vote--are trying to get an 
even bigger vote than that. We haven't had a vote for statehood now for 
decades. This is an entirely new effort on the part of the City.
  In fact, the best expression of where the residents stand on 
statehood came about 4 years ago when we had our first official Senate 
hearing on statehood. Now, I knew there would be some residents who 
came. What I did not anticipate is that they would come in such large 
numbers that, after the standing-room-only room where the hearing was 
being held was filled, the Senate would have to open up other rooms in 
order to accommodate all the residents. So they have voted. They have 
voted with their feet.
  What the District wants now and what Statehood Yes is trying its very 
best to get is an official recognition, an official voice from the 
residents of whether they want statehood or not. And the best way to 
get that is the way they began today, with bipartisan support, with an 
AOL executive who lives in the District chairing the effort to get that 
vote.
  D.C. showed up. They showed up in record numbers when the question 
was: Do you want to listen to the first official hearing in the Senate 
on D.C. voting rights--sorry--on D.C. statehood?
  I am glad I mentioned D.C. voting rights there because the District 
didn't come to statehood easily. When Tom Davis--Representative Tom 
Davis, who decided several years ago to retire from the Congress--was 
here, he approached me about a bipartisan effort to get a vote, just a 
vote, in the people's House. Tom, a Republican, had been in the 
Republican leadership. He was in the majority. He and I worked together 
on what was really an important effort.
  Utah had just missed getting the vote. Utah may be the most 
Republican State in the union, and the reason it missed getting the 
vote was heartbreaking. Its young people fan out every year to other 
countries as part of their missionary work. In past eras, those 
missionaries had been counted in the way they must because they have to 
come home after 2 years.
  For some reason they weren't counted, and Utah went all the way to 
the Supreme Court of the United States, but did not prevail. So it was 
quite a bipartisan effort. I remember working not only with the Utah 
delegation, but with the Governor of the State and with the House and 
the Senate of that State, who approved that bipartisan effort to 
achieve a House vote for D.C. residents and a House vote for Utah.

                              {time}  1930

  That effort succeeded in the House and the Senate at a time when the 
Democrats controlled both parties. What kept it from fruition is also 
heartbreaking, and that is that there was a rider from the National 
Rifle Association attached that, in essence, said, yes, you can give 
D.C. a Member of Congress if--if--the District eliminates all of its 
gun safety laws. That is an offer that had to be refused. It was a 
cynical offer.
  How can you be in the Nation's Capital and not have strong gun safety 
laws? Not only do 700,000 of us live here, but the most controversial 
figures in the world come here. Heads of

[[Page 11983]]

state frequent our streets and our restaurants. They come by in 
caravans of cars every day. So it was an offer that had to be refused.
  But it does show that the District has tried to find incremental ways 
to statehood and been rebuffed. Even as I speak, there is a new and 
important effort going on; and that is the District has moved, pursuant 
to a budget autonomy referendum, to manage its own budget without 
coming to the House of Representatives or the Senate.
  For this referendum, The District was sued. It lost in the U.S. 
district court and went to the court of appeals. As someone who 
practiced constitutional law, I can tell you I had never seen what 
resulted. The U.S. court of appeals eliminated--the District Court 
decision, and submitted the issue of the constitutionality and the 
legality of budget autonomy to the Superior Court of the District of 
Columbia. The Superior Court of the District of Columbia held that the 
District's budget autonomy referendum is valid. So, the irony is that 
the only court decision upholds budget autonomy for the District.
  Understand what we mean by that. It is the same autonomy that every 
Member here not only cherishes, but insists upon. It is your own money. 
It has nothing to do with this House, which contributes nothing. The 
only thing the House contributes to the District of Columbia is what it 
contributes to everybody else. It doesn't give us a thing. Yet if you 
go out in the streets of the District of Columbia, you should be 
envious of what we have done with our economy because what you will see 
is building going on everywhere. People are moving into the District, 
not moving out.
  We know how to support ourselves. We have got more than $2 billion in 
surplus funds. How many Members of this House can boast that? So you 
can see how we object to those who dare tell us how to run our city, 
particularly as we see this House floundering on the Zika virus, a 
health emergency, and we still can't get it done. D.C. doesn't have 
that kind of problem. We can govern ourself without interference by 
others.
  The District is particularly to be complimented on this longer effort 
to achieve D.C. statehood. It has been going on now for the better part 
of 6 months. Too often the city and its residents have grown angry when 
Congress did something to our city. There was an arrest led by the 
former Mayor when he was Mayor and members of the council when there 
was an attachment to our budget after we had gotten every single rider 
or attachment removed that had been undemocratically attached by this 
House. People were arrested.
  But the problem with that approach is not that civil disobedience is 
not to be expected when somebody takes away rights that every American 
citizen should have. The problem with it is you can't wait for the 
Congress to do something really horrendous to you and then say that we 
are now in the mode to get our rights. It has to be a sustained effort. 
What the District is doing now as it tries to use the Tennessee Plan to 
get statehood is part of a sustained effort.
  Today I called for a yearlong plan after that because I do not suffer 
the illusion that a House that can't pass a Zika virus is going to 
reach into its long lost democratic treasure house and give the 
District statehood, but I do certainly believe that it won't happen 
unless you have the kind of effort that is going on now. What the 
District is doing in its effort to achieve statehood, using the 
Tennessee Plan with the bipartisan effort announced today, to me, is 
particularly noteworthy.
  When I come to the House floor, as I often do, as I am this evening, 
to speak about statehood, you are within your rights to say: Says who? 
My answer to that--when the vote comes in in November, with this 
question on the ballot answered by the residents of the District of 
Columbia, I will be able to say: Says who? Says the American citizens 
who live in your Nation's Capital, who also happen to pay the highest 
taxes per capita in the United States of America; that is who. That is 
what I was will say.
  I say to my Republican friends in the District of Columbia, you have 
sent a worthy signal to this House that bipartisanship for D.C. 
statehood begins in the District of Columbia, and now it must be taken 
up by both parties in the House and Senate as well.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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