As President Donald Trump continues to make threats about further involving his administration in local affairs, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) has proposed that the District of Columbia retrocede into Maryland.
District officials have argued for statehood for decades, with lobbying reaching a fever pitch during the last Trump administration despite the GOP’s heavy resistance to such an action. Raskin has a different idea for how the district’s residents can get voting representation in the Senate and House of Representatives.
On the City Cast DC podcast earlier this week, Raskin said he told Mayor Muriel Bowser to consider retrocession and claimed that she “took it under advisement.”
“If you guys want to think about coming back to Maryland for this period, you would definitely be safer in the free state than you’d be under the brutal thumb of MAGA colonialism,” Raskin said on the podcast.
When the district was established in the 19th century, it featured parts of land ceded by Virginia and Maryland. The Virginia portion of the federal district, comprising present-day Arlington County and the city of Alexandria, was returned to the commonwealth in 1847, leaving the Maryland portion as the entirety of present-day Washington.
The district did not have voting rights in the presidential election until it was given three electoral votes in 1961, and it has had a nonvoting delegate in the House of Representatives since 1970. Those votes have always gone to Democratic candidates.
Activists and the local government have pushed for statehood for the district, excluding the parts that would fall under the constitutionally mandated federal district. They are seeking two Senate seats and a voting member in the House of Representatives as part of statehood.
District officials have rejected the notion of retrocession into Maryland multiple times, maintaining that they would accept nothing besides statehood.
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“DC voters have already said loud and clear that we do not want retrocession, we want statehood,” the local government’s website on statehood reads, citing a 2016 referendum backing statehood.
While Democrats and district officials have pushed for statehood, some Republicans have called for the abolition of home rule in the district and the return of control of local affairs to the federal government.