You’ve probably already heard of Lin-Manuel Miranda: the writer and star of the smash musical about the nation’s first treasury secretary, the almost-EGOT, and, potentially, the man with the compositional key to securing D.C. statehood. Emphasis on the word “potentially.”

The D.C. Council Twitter account has sent about half a dozen missives to Miranda (with more planned), using Hamilton lyrics and current events to entreat him to pen a tune in support of making the District the 51st star on the flag.

While statehood will be on the ballot for District residents this November, it would still require Congressional approval for passage.

Josh Gibson, the spokesperson for the D.C. Council and a big fan of the musical (he scored tickets in May to see the original cast) runs @councilofdc. For Gibson—and he’s careful to point out that this is him, “not the embodied voice of the council as an institution”—the musical’s graphics provided inspiration. “Maybe this means I’m obsessed or something, but when I look at the Hamilton poster I just see the D.C. diamond on that,” Gibson says.

The more he thought about it, the more connections he drew between the themes in the musical and D.C.’s strange situation.

The song “‘The Room Where It Happens‘ is about how D.C. became the capital,” says Gibson. “Even then we were something that was being traded off for an unrelated issue, and it seems like even to this day issues unrelated to D.C. statehood are constantly leveraged against our own interests.”

News that Hamilton would come to the Kennedy Center in 2018 added more fuel to the fire.

This wouldn’t be the first advocacy-minded tune for the composer. Miranda, whose parents hail from Puerto Rico, appeared on Last Week Tonight in April with a passionate rap about the island’s debt crisis.

“Obviously his heart is with the Puerto Rico cause, but I just thought the precedent D.C. could set and the relevance to the work he wrote might be enough to pull him in,” says Gibson. Indeed, statehood advocates targeted the island with advertisements during the Puerto Rico primary, connecting both of their odd legal relationships with Congress.

Plus, John Oliver’s show has dedicated ample time to explaining D.C.’s plight. D.C. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton used Oliver’s clip to educate other members of Congress, and District kids sang his pro-statehood song on the Capitol steps.

We’ve seen crazier attempts to woo supporters to the statehood cause in this summer alone. (Remember when Mayor Muriel Bowser brought M&Ms to the Republican National Convention?)

Gibson isn’t betting his bottom dollar on the song happening, though. Miranda has yet to respond (though he has spent the weekend singing Disney tunes on Instagram).

“The quest is a lark,” Gibson admits, noting that the effort does not include contacting Miranda’s management or going through official channels, though he adds, “I would love for it to come true.”

The bigger goal is to keep the public engaged by relating trending topics back to D.C.—like his previous successes getting 360° views of the Wilson Building on Google maps and solving the mystery of a long-forgotten plaque. “The success of the Council’s Twitter feed has been the ‘spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down’ information,” Gibson says. “If every tweet was ‘The Oversight Hearing on the Department of Fire Hydrant Maintenance has been moved from 1 to 1:30,’ people would not tune in.”

Filed Under: council of dc, d.c. statehood, hamilton, josh gibson, lin-manuel miranda, miranda, statehood, twitter,