There is a way to address the complaints many residents of Washington D.C. have without unnecessarily making it a state, Republican Rep. Dusty Johnson told Newsmax TV on Monday.
The South Dakota congressman explained his plan, saying that he sympathized with one of the major arguments those in favor of D.C. statehood put forward — that there should not be taxation without representation, but emphasized that “we do not need to make Washington D.C. a state to get that done.”
He said that the residential parts of D.C. should be returned to Maryland and those people could then become Maryland residents and vote for representatives of the state.
Johnson stressed there is a precedent to this from a century ago, when the residential parts of D.C. that were on the Virginia side were given back to that state and those people became Virginia residents and could vote for their representatives there.
By his plan, Johnson said that D.C. would be shrunk down to only the National Mall, the Capitol, and the White House, “the things that are legitimately part of our seat of government. There would be no permanent residents in Washington D.C.”
He said his plan has picked up momentum on the Republican side. “The problem on the Democrat side,” he explained, “is they want the whole enchilada. They’re not going to settle for half the loaf if they think they can get the whole thing.”
However, the South Dakota Republican stressed that if first the idea of D.C. statehood is defeated, then that could lead people to come to the conclusion that “the best way to give suffrage to residents of the district is my plan.”
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Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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