Coronavirus Shows the Need for D.C. and Puerto Rico Statehood

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/04/01/coronavirus-shows-the-need-for-d-c-and-puerto-rico-statehood/



The coronavirus pandemic has revealed many flaws in America—from a lack of medical equipment in the federal government’s national emergency stockpile to the fact that there’s no universal requirement for employers to offer paid sick leave. It has also reinforced the need to address certain geographic inequities. Case in point: D.C. and Puerto Rico are less equipped to fight the virus than most of the rest of the nation simply because they are not states.

On Friday, President Donald Trump signed into law a $2 trillion stimulus to rescue the economy from the shock of coronavirus, which will provide millions of Americans with direct cash infusions and will allocate billions of dollars in funding to states and municipalities to fight COVID-19. But some parts of the country are getting a lot less help than others. As the Washington Post reported, D.C was intentionally classified as a territory instead of a state, cutting the number of federal dollars the District will receive by more than half. Whereas each state will get $1.25 billion, the bill appropriated $3 billion for D.C. and the five U.S. territories—Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa—to be divided by population. D.C. will ultimately get $500 million in relief, less than half of what it would if it were a state.

“I was enraged by the fact that the District of Columbia was going to be shortchanged,” Senator Chris Van Hollen told the Post, which reported that Democrats tried to classify D.C. as a state in the legislation but that Republicans shut it down as a deal-breaker. This reveals yet another reason why it’s necessary for Democrats to start pushing strenuously for D.C. and Puerto Rico statehood. It’s not just for their own political advantage; as Ben Paviour explained in a 2018 Monthly piece, the party stands to gain a lot by adding four more Democratic senators and several House members. It’s a moral imperative. Without this representation, these areas are grossly neglected, particularly in times of crisis.

D.C. and Puerto Rico don’t have the representatives to lobby for them when it matters. This dynamic was also on display when Congress made decisions about disaster relief for Puerto Rico following its devastating hurricanes and earthquakes. The House and Senate took months to come to a consensus about the amount of aid the territory would receive, leaving the disaster relief unresolved for a dangerous amount of time. Now, with the stimulus (the largest in American history), the District has also seen the financial consequences of being without statehood. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, who represents D.C. as a non-voting member of the House, told the Monthly that this issue never would have occurred if the District had full representation in the House and Senate. “If we had had two senators, this issue would not have come up,” Norton said. “There would have been no notion that any states should have been shortchanged in this way. It’s another indication of why we need D.C. statehood.”

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