White House Threatens to Veto DC Statehood Bill to Stop Its “Voting Power”

June 26th 2020

President Trump signed an Executive Order (White House Photo)

By Emily Singer

The House on Thursday is slated to pass a bill that would make the District of Columbia a state, a move that would give the more than 700,000 residents of the city representation in Congress.

However, a day before the historic vote, the Trump administration threatened to veto the legislation if it ever made it to Donald Trump’s desk — saying it’s unfair that the city would have “the same voting power in the Electoral College as the smallest state in the country,” according to a statement given to Fox News.

Of course, the District of Columbia’s population of 720,687 is more than two U.S. states, according to Census data: Vermont (628,061) and Wyoming (567,025).

Trump has said previously that the real reason he doesn’t want Washington, D.C., to become a state is because it would give Democrats more lawmakers in both the House and Senate.

“They want to do that so they pick up two automatic Democrat — you know it’s a 100 percent Democrat, basically — so why would the Republicans ever do that?” Trump told the New York Post in May about why he’s against D.C. statehood. “That’ll never happen unless we have some very, very stupid Republicans around that I don’t think you do. You understand that, right?”

While the House is expected to pass D.C. statehood for the first time in history, the Senate — run by Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell — likely won’t take it up.

While 41 Democratic senators support making D.C. a state, McConnell has said that he will never support such a measure.

In an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, McConnell said giving the nearly three-quarters of a million residents of the District of Columbia representation in Congress is “full-bore socialism.”

“As long as I’m the majority leader of the Senate, none of that stuff is going anywhere,” McConnell told Ingraham in June 2019 of statehood for Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.

McConnell did not explain how giving democratic representation in Congress to people who live in the United States and pay federal taxes is “socialism.”

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