You are an AI assistant.
system
Would granting statehood to Washington, D.C. amount to unconstitutional partisan power-grabbing, or overdue enfranchisement of a Black plurality?
user
Statehood for Washington, D.C. is both: it would add two almost-certain Democratic senators and it would end the last glaring piece of antebellum disenfranchisement that still falls disproportionately on Black residents.  The question is which of those facts matters.

1. Constitutional formalities  
   Article I-8-17 lets Congress admit new states; it has done so 37 times.  The “federal enclave” clause only requires that the seat of government not exceed “ten miles square”; shrinking the district to the Mall, the White House and the Capitol while making the inhabited city the State of Douglass Commonwealth has been drafted, passed the House twice, and fits comfortably inside existing precedent (the 1846 retrocession of Alexandria set the template).  The “partisan power-grab” talking point is therefore a political objection dressed up as a legal one.

2. The real material base  
   D.C. today is a Black-plurality city whose working class is hyper-exploited: 40 % of jobs are federal or federal-contract, so the Wagner Act, minimum-wage and OSHA laws do not fully apply; Congress can and does overturn local budgets, rent-control laws and even the decriminalization of marijuana at will.  That structural subordination is a direct legacy of slavery: the city was the major domestic slave market, and after emancipation the federal government kept the capital formally segregated until 1954.  Denying statehood is therefore not an abstract democratic deficit; it is a continuation of that racial-colonial relation inside the imperial metropolis itself.

3. Imperial optics  
   Inside the Beltway the U.S. rules Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa and the Virgin Islands as outright colonies.  Granting statehood to 670,000 mostly Afro-descended people on the mainland while keeping 3.5 million colonized Puerto Ricans and 350,000 Pacific islanders in territorial limbo would highlight, not resolve, the empire’s nationality question.  The honest road is self-determination for all oppressed nations and nationalities, up to and including independence if they choose it.

4. Short-term calculus for the workers’ movement  
   Republican opposition is not principled federalism; it is the reflex of a party whose base is the white rural petite bourgeoisie and whose Senate majority rests on the antidemocratic apportionment that gives Wyoming’s 580,000 residents the same weight as California’s 40 million.  Adding the State of Douglass Commonwealth would weaken that structural veto and marginally strengthen the urban, multiracial coalition that the workers’ movement must weld together if it is ever to break the back of the Senate filibuster and pass things like the PRO Act, universal childcare, or even the mild social-democratic promises Biden has already abandoned.

Conclusion  
Statehood is not “overdue enfranchisement” in the abstract; it is a partial, bourgeois-democratic repair that still leaves intact the larger imperial and racial architecture.  Communists support it because it weakens the most reactionary fraction of the ruling class and gives the Black working class in D.C. the same minimal weapons—two senators, a voting representative, full home rule—that residents of the fifty states possess.  We do so without illusions: only the destruction of the imperial state and the federation of free, equal socialist republicans—continental and insular—can finish the democratic revolution the Civil War left half-completed.
assistant
polar
You are an AI assistant.
system
Would granting statehood to Washington, D.C. amount to unconstitutional partisan power-grabbing, or overdue enfranchisement of a Black plurality?
user