Photo by Bullneck

Washington, D.C. is not a state. Yet it acts as more than a city to the people who live here.

This presented an issue for one resident as she attempted to board a plane in Phoenix and was questioned by a Transportation Security Administration agent about her D.C. license. From the Post:

According to Ashley Brandt, an agent with the Transportation Security Administration took a look at her D.C. license and began to shake her head. “I don’t know if we can accept these,” Brandt recalled the agent saying. “Do you have a U.S. passport?’

Brandt was dumbfounded, and quickly grew a little scared. A manager was summoned, she says. “I started thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, I have to get home. Am I going to get home?’ ”
…
Brandt says the agent yelled out to a supervisor, working in adjacent security line. Are D.C. licenses valid identification?

Brandt says she could hear the response, “Yeah, we accept those.”

A person in the Post’s comments section says the same thing happened in San Francisco.

The young TSA officer wanted to see my passport because she thought my District of Columbia driver’s license somehow was from the nation of Colombia. When I explained to her that I lived in Washington, D.C. and asked her what the capital of the U-S might be – and where the White House was – she gave me a puzzled look. When I told her it was in Washington D.C. and I lived in the same city where the White House and the Capitol building are located, it seemed like a light when on in her head.

She called for a supervisor, and then said, “so, you’re from the state of Washington?”

The supervisor showed up a minute later and let me through.

While this is obviously frustrating, can we blame a TSA agent in Arizona or California for not realizing that over 600,000 United States citizens don’t live in a state, but rather some weird in between (see: a federal district) where they pay federal taxes but don’t have voting representation in Congress? Take this conversation Politico’s Byron Tau ‘s friend Adrienne Shade had this week with a Comcast representative.

The education solution? Get Britney Spears to re-record “I’m Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman” except with lyrics about the struggle for D.C. statehood.

Update: Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, who is a senior member of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, has released a statement about the incident:

The rejection of Ashley Brandt’s D.C. driver’s license by TSA because D.C. is not a state has moved collective insult to personal injury. The daily disrespect of requiring D.C. residents to pay up on April 15 without a vote in the House or the Senate has now been dramatically personified in the insult to one of our own. I will be contacting TSA to make sure their agents have the appropriate information about the jurisdictions of the United States. This afternoon, I hope to reach Ms. Brandt, a preschool teacher in the District, to offer an apology and to inform her that we are taking corrective action.

Filed Under: d.c., statehood, TSA,