Friday on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said it was “anti-American” that her city is not a state with full representation in the U.S. Senate.
Bowser said, “We’re in a historic march for statehood. We know that the district becoming the 51st state is the only way the 700,000 taxpaying Americans are fully represented and become full Americans. And that’s why we are fighting for statehood for D.C.”
She continued, “We’ve answered all of the questions that have been lobbed against us about statehood. And now all that is left is that the issue of whether Americans should be represented in the Congress who pay taxes is a partisan issue, Democrat versus Republican. But that’s not really the question that the members should be asking themselves. They should be asking themselves what is fair and what reflects the principles of the American democracy. D.C. residents being the only people in the free world whose capital city residents aren’t represented in the capital is simply anti-American.”
She added, “We’re bigger than Wyoming and Vermont, and unlike the territories, which we’ve been compared to recently, we pay all of the federal taxes that every American pays in the 50 states. So when you see “taxation without representation” on our license plates, we’re paying more per capita than any jurisdiction, giving more to the federal government than we get back, we’re literally being taxed without being represented. Our Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton has been fighting this fight to get a vote in the House of Representatives. Currently, we don’t have anybody speaking for us in the Senate. And getting two senators and being fully autonomous is what statehood means for Washington, D.C..”
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