Photo by Bullneck
The New Hampshire House of Representatives today voted down a resolution that would have made the Granite State the first state to officially endorse the prospect of granting full statehood to the District of Columbia, about two weeks after a committee there did the same. The measure, which was not expected to pass, fell on a vote of 248 against and 79 in support.
The vote was largely along party lines, a spokeswoman for the New Hampshire House; Republicans outnumber Democrats in the chamber by a nearly 3-to-1 ratio.
Last month, a delegation of District officials including Mayor Vince Gray and several members of the D.C. Council traveled to Concord to press lawmakers on the State-Federal Relations and Veterans Affairs Committee to give their blessing to making the District the 51st state. It was a tall order, with the panel’s majority Republicans questioning the constitutional validity of granting full local sovereignty to the nation’s capital.
The D.C. representatives tried a wide variety of arguments—Gray compared the District’s motto of “Taxation Without Representation” to New Hampshire’s flinty mantra of “Live Free or Die,” for example, and Councilmember Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3) offered the model set by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 that set the guidelines for the creation of the states that now comprise the Upper Midwest. (On an unrelated note, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has since used the same example to argue for potentially granting statehood to the moon.)
The New Hampshire resolution had been sponsored by State Rep. Cindy Rosenwald, a Democrat from the town of Hillsborough who has long advocated for D.C. statehood. She sponsored a similar resolution in 2008, but a vote was never taken due to inclement weather that prevented the New Hampshire House from convening when it was supposed to vote on that bill.
Rosenwald’s bill this year was the first in what Councilmember Michael A. Brown (I-At Large) hopes to get out of statehouses around the country. A resolution embracing D.C. statehood was filed late last month with a committee in the Florida legislature, but it was hoped New Hampshire would be the first to pass such a measure. At the committee hearing in January, which was also attended by representatives of the organization DC Vote as well as a group of activists who went on a weeks-long hunger strike in December in protest of the District’s lack of statehood, one legislator floated amending the resolution from making a full-throated call for statehood to one endorsing a voting seat in Congress. That idea never took hold, and Rosenwald’s measure went down in its original form.
The resolution, despite not having the backing of the committee, was still permitted to be filed in the full house under a minority report, which Rosenwald did. Not that the resulting vote was any more welcoming.
Oh, well. On to the Sunshine State.
