Why Eleanor Holmes Norton Is Optimistic About D.C. Statehood
Thirty years after the congresswoman’s statehood bill failed, she’s seeing a light at the end of the tunnel
On Monday, the House Oversight Committee held a hearing to discuss H.R. 51, the bill to give the District of Columbia statehood. Under the legislation, the federal city would change its name to Washington, Douglass Commonwealth, keeping the same D.C. initials but now honoring famed resident and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, instead of invoking a personification of America whose name derives from Christopher Columbus’s. The town known as everything from “Chocolate City” to “this town” would finally get two U.S. senators and one representative in the House.
The bill, like so many touching on life in Washington, is the work of Democratic Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D.C.’s longtime nonvoting delegate, to address the inequities suffered by residents. Among them: They pay the highest federal taxes per capita in the United States, yet lack representation at the highest levels of government. Norton has been lobbying for statehood for much of her 30-year career in Congress, and H.R. 51 was actually approved by the House last year but never reached the then-GOP-led Senate. Even now, given that the Democrats lack the 60-vote threshold to avoid a…
