https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/elections-2020/the-constitution-says-no-to-dc-statehood/ar-BB15MkiW It’s not by accident or oversight that the nation’s capital isn’t a state: The Founding Fathers wrote it into the Constitution. Article I, Section 8 provides explicitly for a national capital that would not be part of a state nor treated as a state, but rather a unique enclave under the exclusive authority of Congress — a neutral “district” in which representatives of all the states could meet on an equal footing to conduct the nation’s business. https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8/ Reasonable people can disagree on the wisdom or fairness of the framers’ plan, but the only way to change it is to amend the Constitution. That’s exactly what happened in 1961, when the 23rd Amendment was ratified and D.C. residents were granted the right to vote in presidential elections and participate in the Electoral College. In 1978 Congress passed another amendment, giving the District of Columbia seats in the Senate and the House, but only 16 states ratified it. It may frustrate Washingtonians to be denied the perquisites of statehood on Capitol Hill, but Americans plainly have not wanted to change the Constitution to make that happen. So House Democrats have come up with a creative constitutional workaround. H.R. 51, the bill to be voted on next Friday, purports to shrink the District of Columbia to just the few blocks along the National Mall containing the various federal government buildings, such as the White House, the Capitol, the Supreme Court, plus the “principal federal monuments.” The rest of the city would be rechristened “Washington, Douglass Commonwealth,” and admitted as the 51st state. Give the drafters points for ingenuity, but their scheme is too clever by half. Congress cannot change the status of the capital district simply by redefining it. Washington, D.C.’s one-of-a-kind standing in the federal system is spelled out in the Constitution; the only way to modify that standing is to modify the Constitution. The plain meaning of Article I is that “the Seat of Government of the United States” comprises all the land supplied for that purpose. H.R. 51 would turn it instead into exactly what the Framers rejected — an island of government buildings, with perhaps a few hundred residents, enveloped within a state.