Peter Bolton: Why I reject retrocession for DC

Last year, I had an unexpected immersion into DC politics that exponentially increased my knowledge of the issues facing the District. When I contacted the DC Statehood Green Party (whose nominees I have always voted for) to inquire about their candidate for Ward 2’s DC Council race, they said they didn’t have one and asked if I would like to throw my hat into the ring. And so it was that I entered the Ward 2 race, which had been made significantly more interesting (not to mention competitive) with the fall from grace of longtime Council member Jack Evans.

As the Statehood Green nominee, I included statehood for DC as a central tenet of my platform, and I argued that my Democratic Party rivals couldn’t be trusted to deliver it. After all, their party failed to do so during the first two years of Barack Obama’s first term when they controlled the presidency and both chambers of Congress. I therefore proposed that the DC Council and government begin taking more aggressive measures to pressure the federal government into granting statehood. My ideas included disallowing the federal government from using District amenities or hosting events at DC public schools until it granted us our right to full representation in Congress and ended the federal government’s ability to override laws passed by our own local government.

I have been pleasantly surprised by the Democrats’ firm stance and palpable action on this issue since Joe Biden entered the White House in January. Last month, the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed a bill that would grant DC statehood. The bill, however, needs 60 votes to get through the Senate. The Democrats only hold 50 (that is, half) of the seats and hold the Senate majority only by virtue of the vice president’s ability to cast the deciding vote in the case of a tie.

Republicans, needless to say, are doing everything they can to thwart DC statehood. While some talk of a principled stance based on constitutional concerns, their true motivation seems clear: They don’t want two more Senate seats for a jurisdiction that would almost certainly elect Democratic candidates given DC’s deep blue political orientation. Even supposedly “moderate” Republicans have expressed opposition, with Maine Sen. Susan Collins stating that she believes DC should instead become part of Maryland. 

This alternative to statehood is known in DC political parlance as “retrocession.” It has long been touted as an alternative to statehood that backers say would address the major deficits of the status quo. Such supporters include independent candidate David Krucoff, who last year challenged the District’s long-serving Democrat, Eleanor Holmes Norton, for DC’s non-voting House delegate. Essentially, DC’s delegate represents the city at large in Congress and can sit in committees but cannot cast a vote on chamber-wide floor votes.

Krucoff argued that retrocession would, in essence, deliver statehood via a different (and, in his view, more realistic) route since District residents would become residents of an existing state. They would therefore achieve representation via their newfound ability to vote for two Maryland senators and a representative for whatever Maryland House district they ended up in. 

Like other advocates of retrocession, Krucoff also argues that the maneuver has a historical precedent since Arlington County and Alexandria in Virginia took exactly this path in the mid-19th century. Early in George Washington’s presidency, Maryland and Virginia both gave land along the Potomac River to the federal government for the formation of a capital city for the newly independent nation. But in 1847 the federal government ceded back the area that had belonged to Virginia, which was reincorporated into the state as Arlington County and the city of Alexandria.

I will come clean that I was at one point more receptive to the idea of retrocession than were other members of my party. I once suggested that retrocession would be my second choice after statehood, which certainly raised a few eyebrows among my fellow Statehood Greens! I was impressed both by Krucoff as a person — he struck me as articulate and fair-minded — and with his pitch, which seemed both well-considered and realistic.

But as someone with a day job in journalism, I naturally began to dig deeper into the topic. And as I did so, I found one glaring problem with retrocession: It simply doesn’t have very much support in either jurisdiction. A research report by George Washington University in 2000 found little support among DC residents, while a 2016 poll reported by the Washington City Paper found support among Maryland residents to be under 30%. Moreover, a 2016 ballot measure asking DC residents if they favored statehood for the city passed with a massive 86% in support.

Furthermore, the frequent comparisons with the situation with Virginia fail to take into account the different timescales at play. DC and Maryland have been separate for well over 200 years, compared to the roughly 50 years between DC’s founding and the return of Arlington and Alexandria to Virginia. In short, retrocession would result in a pretty bizarre shotgun marriage between two unwilling groups of people who have developed very different political cultures. Therefore, whatever its superficial appeal, retrocession is simply a nonstarter given the facts on the ground. Evidently, the proof is in the pudding: Krucoff gained only 1.5% of the vote in his challenge to Norton, who has been a longtime proponent of statehood.

Republicans, meanwhile, need to be called out for their political posturing. Though they will surely deny it, their opposition is grounded purely in plain partisan self-interest. Meanwhile, their complaints that two senators for DC would give overrepresentation to a small jurisdiction are hypocritical and self-serving. DC wouldn’t even be the smallest state by population since Wyoming and Vermont have even fewer people. In any case, small, rural and right-leaning states already give Republicans an unfair advantage both in the Senate and (albeit to a lesser extent) in the House.

Statehood for DC is just and now looks increasingly inevitable. It’s time to end the status quo of disenfranchisement and federal serfdom. Statehood activists must keep up the pressure on the Democrats to deliver on the rightful wishes of DC residents for the full representation enjoyed by residents in the current 50 states.

Peter Bolton, a DC-based journalist, is a regular contributor to The Canary and CounterPunch, where he writes about global politics. He ran in 2020 for the Ward 2 seat on the DC Council as the DC Statehood Green Party nominee.

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