Washington, D.C. Admission Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I am thrilled to rise and join my colleagues in pressing the case for DC statehood. I won't be long because I was on the floor about 3 weeks ago talking about this same matter. I really talked about Virginia then. I talked about Patrick Henry.

The phrase ``no taxation without representation'' is a phrase that we learn coming up in elementary school. The root of it isn't really at the beginning of, say, the Declaration of Independence or during the Revolutionary War; that phrase really came about as colonists rallied to oppose the Stamp Act.

The Stamp Act was an act of Parliament in 1765 that put a tax on paper goods, including newspapers and pamphlets and periodicals. The English Crown was getting very, very worried about the restive nature of Americans pressing their case for being treated equally as royal colonists and subjects of the Crown, but they were not happy with the way they were being treated.

The Stamp Act was an attempt not just to levy a tax, but it was also an attempt to shut down their rights to have political discussions.

Patrick Henry led an effort in the Virginia General Assembly in 1765 that came to be known as the four resolves. He put five resolves on the table, one of which was set aside, but four resolves were passed, and the core of the four resolves was to protest taxation without representation.

One of my great regrets was wanting to hear the great orators of history and never to have had a chance to hear Patrick Henry, although I have heard good Patrick Henry impersonations at St. John's Church in Richmond. What a powerful speaker--the ``Give me liberty or give me death'' speech on the very kind of verge of the United States declaring independence; his court advocacy as a relatively untrained lawyer in Virginia on behalf of religious freedoms so that people who were not part of the established Church of England could still practice their faith as they chose. But many believe that Henry's advocacy against the Stamp Act was his most powerful oratory.

I read excerpts from the resolves when I was here 3 weeks ago, but now I want to jump from Patrick Henry to somebody else who is very much in the spirit of Patrick Henry, and that is Frederick Douglass.

If DC becomes a State, it will become a State named in honor of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

Frederick Douglass certainly was an inheritor of the Patrick Henry tradition. He was enslaved for the first 20 years of his life, and then following the Civil War, he moved to the Nation's Capital to become so many things--diplomat, civil rights leader, confidant of President Lincoln, President Grant, and others.

In his autobiography, ``The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass,'' he wrote:

The District of Columbia is the one spot where there is no government for the people, of the people, and by the people. Its citizens submit to rulers whom they have had no choice in selecting. They obey laws which they had no voice in making. They have a [sic] plenty of taxation, but no representation. In the great questions of politics in the country, they can march with neither army [neither party], but are relegated to the position of neuters.

Those are the words of the great Frederick Douglass echoing the Patrick Henry speech a century earlier against the Stamp Act. Those words are as true today as they were when he wrote them, and they were as true when he wrote them as when Patrick Henry delivered them in 1765.

In the history of States coming into the Union, most States have some pretty interesting background and history, but there are some common themes. The two commonalities--but then there has been one quirk that I want to mention as I conclude--the two commonalities are States come into the Union when they achieve sufficient population and when they have a demonstrated desire that is not just temporary, effervescent, but is essentially fixed and permanent

In the mid-1800s, Congress would set a population deadline. Say, for example, in the Northwest Territory, Michigan was told: As soon as you get to 60,000 residents, then we will entertain you if you want to be a State, but you have to do a referendum first.

There is no minimum number established by Congress in terms of population now to become a State, but we would all agree that DC would pass any minimum because DC is larger than States that currently are part of the Union. So whatever criteria we might set--well, you need to be of sufficient size to be a State--DC has met that.

DC has met the second criteria as well, which is demonstrated desire, most recently in a referendum in 2016 where the overwhelming sentiment of DC, as you would expect, was a patriotic sentiment: We want to be a State of the greatest Nation on Earth.

So those two criteria have usually been sufficient for States having demonstrated that or territories or populations having demonstrated that to become part of the Union and to have their star added to the flag of this country.

There have been controversies, though, bluntly, when States have sizable minority populations.

The quest of Hawaii for statehood took longer than it otherwise would have because many Members of this body stood on the floor and expressed concerns about whether Hawaii would be a cultural match for the United States because of the predominant API and indigenous population. I am sad to say that some of those who took the floor and raised those questions and objections were from Virginia.

The State of New Mexico had a particularly rocky path to becoming a State because Members of this body, including from Virginia, took the floor and raised a question about the size, the population, the percentage of New Mexico's indigenous and Latino population.

About 46 percent of the population of DC is African American, folks who--many march in the footsteps and quest for the same equality that Frederick Douglass was questing for in the 1800s.

I hope we can show that the failures of the past that led statehood for New Mexico and Hawaii to take perhaps longer than should have been the case--I hope we will have learned something from that and can move finally to grant these 700,000-plus residents of this wonderful city in our Nation's Capital the ability to be a State.

The last thing I will say is this. I did say this when I was on the floor 3 months ago. We haven't added a State, we haven't added a star to our flag for I guess 70 years now, about 70 years. I don't think a fixed number of stars on the flag sends a message of a growing, thriving nation. I think it might send the message of a nation that is kind of fixed. When you are fixed and set and not willing to change, I believe that can almost send a little bit of a message of decline.

Throughout our Nation's history, the addition of stars to the flag has sent the message of an America that--we are not done growing. We are not done expanding. We are on the move. History isn't done with us yet.

The fact that we haven't added a State--this has been the longest period of time in the history of the United States where we haven't added a star to the flag. I think doing so would suggest very powerfully that the best days of our Nation aren't behind us; they are still ahead of us.

For these reasons and those articulated by my colleagues, I strongly support the effort for DC statehood.

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