Opinion | Thank You, President Trump

Thanks, President Trump, for getting people to think about statehood again. Last year, as President Trump and his allies relished their return to power, President Trump engaged in trolling, basically, of the nation’s closest ally, Canada, repeatedly suggesting that Canada might become the country’s 51st state. The president, I suppose when he gets bored, still floats this idea of annexing other countries to become new American states. The president shared a meme depicting Venezuela as the 51st state. I don’t think there’s going to be a world, right, in which Venezuela is a territory of the U.S. But I do think that there’s something almost useful in the president’s playing with this idea of creating new states. That’s because it’s been many years, over 60, in fact, since the U.S. has admitted a new state into the union. There was a period in our history when we were admitting new states on a somewhat regular basis. This served to kind of always upset the political equilibrium in the country, shaking things up somewhat. The total absence of new states, the absence of new amendments, for that matter, has done something unusual, I think, when you look at the full breadth of American history. It’s created the impression that the country, in some sense, is finished, it’s static. It’s not going to change in any fundamental ways. We need something that will shake up the system, that will shake loose American politics in ways that may just produce new and unpredictable dynamics. And I think we have at least one thing that we can do pretty easily. Let’s just admit a couple of new states. Washington, D.C., has wanted statehood for a long time. Puerto Ricans have debated statehood for some time as well. And then we have a collection of territories — Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands — whose residents are Americans but who do not have political representation in Congress. Any attempt to create new states is going to be a party project, the partisan project. One imagines that Democrats might want to look at making D.C. a state. “There’s nothing in the Constitution that says that the District should not be a state. But the fact that there will be party or partisan advantage is no reason to deprive Americans first of their representation in Congress. And so, looking ahead, potentially to a Democratic trifecta in 2029, I think the Democratic Party ought to give serious consideration to putting statehood — for D.C., at least — at the top of its agenda. If Democrats decide that they want to relieve some of the malapportionment of the Senate by getting two reliably Democratic senators, that is totally legitimate. Beyond that, we are looking at a catastrophic collapse in Black representation in the House of Representatives. “We can end up having six congressional districts with no African American or Democratic representation.” The Senate in particular is much whiter and more male than the country at large. So thanks, President Trump, for getting people to think about statehood again. And Democrats, consider embracing statehood as a political tool the next time you have power.