One of the ways Democrats are hoping to gain more electoral and congressional power is by changing the status of heavily Democratic Washington D.C. from a federally controlled district to the 51st state. In January, a Democratic Congressman introduced House Resolution 51, the “Washington, D.C., Admission Act,” which would “provide for the admission of the State of Washington, D.C. into the Union,” and her fellow Democrats overwhelmingly signed on. On Thursday, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform held the first hearing on the bill.
Among the Democrats enthusiastically supporting the bill is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who took to Twitter to promote it but was quickly met with pushback after making an historically inaccurate claim while doing so. One of the reasons D.C. should be granted statehood, she suggested, is because it was “the 1st territory in the United States to free the enslaved.”
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