Why Texans Should Should Support DC Statehood

700,000 Americans are taxed without representation. Texans should be pissed about that.

Aug 11, 2025

Still no quorum in the Texas House today, with only 96 members showing up.

Here in the South, growing up, many of us learned about the Great Migration and how Black people escaped Jim Crow laws, racial terror, and disenfranchisement, migrated up North, and to the Midwest. Thousands of Black Southerners also moved to Washington, DC, making it one of the largest majority-Black cities in the U.S. by the mid-20th century.

From the late 19th century into the early 20th century, the federal government in DC was one of the largest and most stable employers of Black Americans in the country. Government clerical, postal, and administrative jobs were considered good, middle-class work, and they offered stability that was rare for Black workers in the Jim Crow era. By the 1970s, DC’s population was over 70% Black. Although due to gentrification and displacement, the demographics have shifted, in 2025, 45% of the population in DC will still be Black.

Understanding this history matters because Washington, DC’s fight for self-governance is inseparable from its Black history. Every inch of Home Rule was won in the face of racist efforts to strip political power from a majority-Black city. That’s what makes Trump’s takeover so egregious. 700,000 taxpaying Americans, most of them people of color, are being ruled without full representation, their local government overruled at the whim of a president they cannot even elect to Congress.

Texans know what power grabs look like.

We’ve seen it when Greg Abbott guts local budgets in Austin, takes over Houston schools, or shoves state cops into El Paso to make a Fox News segment. But here’s the thing, DC residents have never had the right to tell the feds to get lost. They’ve had to live under the constant threat that Congress or the president can wipe out their local control on a political whim.

If you think it’s outrageous when Austin voters pass a measure and the Legislature kills it, imagine the president rolling into Austin, firing the police chief, and ordering DPS to follow his personal agenda, no vote, no say, no representation. That’s what just happened.

In Washington, DC, Home Rule is basically a compromise between full self-government and direct federal control, and it’s a compromise that keeps DC residents as second-class citizens. Before 1973, DC had no elected local government. Congress and the president directly ran the city. This was partly a backlash against Reconstruction-era Black political power after Black men gained the vote in 1867 and began winning offices.

Then the Home Rule Act was passed by Congress and signed by Nixon in 1973, and gave DC the right to elect its own mayor and city council for the first time. (But it came with a lot of strings attached.)

No taxation without representation.

How many bumper stickers have you seen in Texas with those very words? No taxation without representation. Shit, you could say this entire gerrymandering fight is a fight about taxation without representation, because the Republican government wants to take away our representation, but keep taxing us to pay their salaries.

Here’s the real fucked up part. DC pays more in federal taxes per person than any state in the country. More than Texas. And they don’t even get a single voting member in Congress. Not one.

Knowing Texans, we’d probably be our own country again if we had to send billions of dollars up the chain without having our two Senators and 38 Congress members. So why do we shrug it off when 700,000 people in DC get taxed, policed, and governed by folks they didn’t get to elect? It’s basically colonialism.

Statehood is a check on power, no matter who’s in the White House.

Today, it’s Trump steamrolling DC’s elected mayor. Tomorrow, it could be some other president pulling the same stunt in a different crisis.

If DC were a state, it would have the same constitutional protections Texas uses to tell Washington, “You don’t run this place.” Without statehood, any president can cook up some flimsy “emergency,” grab the reins, and take over the city’s police, budget, and laws. That’s a blank check for whoever’s sitting in the Oval Office.

Texans benefit when democracy is stronger everywhere.

We know gerrymandering, voter suppression, and gutting local control are authoritarianism. We’ve been living through it here.

If it’s “normal” for the federal government to bulldoze local rule in DC, don’t think that precedent stops there. It’ll get used again, somewhere else, on somebody else, and eventually, on us.

Statehood isn’t just about DC It’s about setting a floor under democracy so every community’s voice counts, whether you’re in the Panhandle or on the Potomac. If we don’t defend it everywhere, we’ll lose it anywhere.

As we enter 2026, every Democrat running for Senate or Congress from Texas must know that we expect you to vote yes on DC statehood. No hedging, no “it’s not a priority right now,” no backroom deals that kick the can down the road. We’ve seen what happens when you let basic democratic rights depend on who’s in the White House, and we’re not playing that game. If you want our votes, we expect yours, for DC to finally have the same voice and protections we do.

Right now, so much of the fight is about holding the line.

Stopping voter suppression, beating back gerrymanders, and blocking the next power grab before it takes root. That matters. But protecting democracy isn’t enough if we never expand it.

DC statehood is one of the clearest, simplest ways to do that. It’s 700,000 Americans getting the same rights as the rest of us. It’s undoing a century and a half of racist power plays that kept a majority-Black city under federal control. And it’s making sure no president, Democrat or Republican, can erase an entire community’s voice because they feel like it.

If we believe in democracy, we can’t just guard the edges. We have to widen the circle. That means bringing DC in, fully and equally, and making it clear that in this country, no one is too small, too urban, or too Black to deserve full representation.