House votes to make Washington, DC, the US's 51st state

• The House on Thursday passed a bill along party lines that would make Washington, DC, the 51st state.
• HR 51 would give DC two voting senators, one voting member of the House, and a governor.
• But the bill isn't likely to receive the 60 votes needed to beat a filibuster in the Senate.

The House of Representatives passed a bill along party lines on Thursday that would make Washington, DC, the nation's 51st state.

The legislation, known as the Washington, DC, Admissions Act, or HR 51, would make the district a state known as the Douglass Commonwealth, named for the revered Black abolitionist Fredrick Douglass. The House passed it 216-208.

While a constitutional amendment passed in 1964 gave DC three electoral votes, the city's approximately 700,000 residents do not have any voting representation in Congress. HR 51 would give DC two senators, one member of Congress, and a governor. Certain federal land and buildings, including the National Mall, the White House, and the Capitol, would be part of a separate, federally controlled jurisdiction.

Stasha Rhodes, the director of the 51 for 51 campaign, thanked Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington, DC's delegate to the House of Representatives, for her "tireless efforts to help bring the statehood movement to this historic point."

But HR 51 faces serious hurdles in the Senate, where it would need at least 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. Progressive activists and many Democratic lawmakers have called on the upper chamber to eliminate the filibuster, which would allow the bill to pass with a simple-majority vote. The Senate is split between Democrats and Republicans; Vice President Kamala Harris holds the tiebreaking vote.

Rhodes also called for eliminating the filibuster. "We are calling on Leader Schumer and his colleagues in the Senate to not allow one vestige of slavery and Jim Crow to prevent us from rectifying another," Rhodes said. "We cannot allow D.C. statehood to become the next bill in a long line of civil rights legislation killed by the filibuster."

Republicans who oppose DC statehood have argued that the bill is unconstitutional and a Democratic "power grab," pointing to the city's overwhelming majority of Democratic voters. Some GOP lawmakers agree with Democrats that DC residents should have representation in Congress but say they should vote for Maryland's federal lawmakers rather than form their own state.

GOP lawmakers have also claimed that DC has too small of a population - though it has more residents than both Wyoming and Vermont - and is too corrupt and dependent on the federal government to be a state, among other arguments.

After the House Oversight and Reform Committee approved the measure last week, the White House formally backed the bill with a statement calling DC's lack of representation undemocratic.

"For far too long, the more than 700,000 people of Washington, D.C. have been deprived of full representation in the U.S. Congress," the White House said in a statement on Tuesday. "This taxation without representation and denial of self-governance is an affront to the democratic values on which our Nation was founded."

This is the second time in two years that the House has passed similar legislation. The previous Republican-controlled Senate declined to bring the legislation up for a vote.

In a 2016 referendum, a large majority of DC residents - 86% - said they supported statehood.