There Once Was a Republican Fight for D.C. Statehood

Updated at 9:20 a.m. ET on June 17, 2021.

When residents of Washington, D.C., got the chance to vote in the 1956 presidential primaries, their first opportunities to vote since Reconstruction, it was at the behest of a Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, who phrased his support in conservative terms: “In the District of Columbia the time is long overdue for granting national suffrage to its citizens and also applying the principle of local self-government to the Nation’s Capital.” When the district gained electoral votes under the Twenty-Third Amendment in 1961, the charge was led by Senator Kenneth Keating, a New York Republican. In 1970, Republican President Richard Nixon signed legislation giving the district a nonvoting delegate in the House. And when another amendment sought to give D.C. full congressional representation in 1978, the Republican Edward Brooke, of Massachusetts, introduced the measure in the Senate.

This largely forgotten history is surprising today,