Name: Dr. Robinson Woodward-Burns 

Occupation: Professor of Political Science at Howard University 

Hometown: Washington, DC 

Tell me a little bit about yourself. How long have you lived in DC? 

I grew up here in DC — I spent my life here until I left to go to college and then graduate school, after which I came back. I was out of DC for a total of nine years of my life, but eventually I came back. 

Why did you decide to move to DC? 

I came back to DC, because DC is home. While many people have a choice about where they want to live, I came back to take care of my parents and to be with my friends who’ve also remained here. While leaving DC gave me some opportunities like an education, it really was never exactly a choice — I came back to DC because I wanted to be with my friends and family. 

What do you love most about living in DC? 

There’s a lot about DC. Often, people not from Washington think of the seat of the national government — they know fairly little about the actual people who live here, are from here, or who have made their homes here. DC has, like any city, a vibrant culture. It’s got an endemic cuisine — for example, the half-smoke, which is a type of hot dog. We’ve got a type of music called Go-go, which is not widely known outside of DC, but something that was homegrown. We also had in the 1980s a punk-rock scene, which grew out of DC and spread nationally. Like any city, we’ve got our food, our music, our culture, and these are partly the things that drew me back, but I also came to be with my friends, who I’ve known since early childhood and who decided to come back as well. I came back for my family, my parents, who are here. And I came back because it’s home — I couldn’t see myself living anywhere else. 

Could you talk about your own experience being disenfranchised, or in other words, what it has been like to lose the rights you had when you were living in one of the 50 states? 

When I left DC, I gained representation. For the first time, I had representatives in the House and in the Senate. For example, when I went to graduate school in Pennsylvania, I had two United States Senators who had a fair amount of influence in Pennsylvania — also a swing state in presidential elections, which is fairly important, although DC does have the presidential vote thanks to the 23rd Amendment. What I found was that having a representative in the House and a representative in the Senate was a way that I could have my voice heard — if you need to contact your local government, you can do it through the office of your Senator or your House member. A lot of that is missing in the District of Columbia. When I came back, I lost my representation in the U.S. Senate. To the extent that I lost House representation, I came back to a District where we have a delegate who does not have full representation. 

Separately, there’s an issue of Home Rule. DC lacks budgetary autonomy; right now we see members of the U.S. House pushing to roll back laws passed by the District Council by passing budget riders, which could make Democrats in Congress — in order to pass nationally necessary budget measures — actually roll back forms of District Home Rule. We saw this on DC’s crime reform bill — the District tried to rewrite a 100-year-old criminal code, which, though was necessary and largely apolitical, got politicized by Republicans in the U.S. House, and ultimately was overturned. When I lived outside of DC, I had legislative Home Rule, I had that representative function that I lost when I came home. It’s important to remember not only the function of having representatives in Congress, but also having legislative Home Rule, which can affect your life in concrete ways. 

There have been a few moments since I came back in which I saw living in DC as distinct and different from living in another jurisdiction or state that has full representation. I’ll give you three moments. One, in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor protests: Donald Trump mobilized the National Guard against DC residents who were engaging in their Constitutionally-protected right to assembly. He had DC National Guard helicopters flying low over residents to disperse them. In most states, the National Guard is controlled by the governor, and few governors would actually employ the National Guard against their own voting constituency, but because DC doesn’t have representation, people throughout DC saw the Guard deployed in ways that were hostile to Washingtonians. 

 

A second example: On January 6th, the Department of Justice under Donald Trump actually refused to deploy the National Guard in defense of the United States Capitol until it was too late to prevent rioters from breaching the Capitol. Again, were DC a state that had its own governor, we could see the National Guard deployed quickly to protect assets belonging to residents, to protect even nationally important buildings like the U.S. Capitol. DC’s denial of control over its National Guard actually endangered national security, and that was something I was really surprised to see when I moved back to DC — that DC lacked autonomy over its National Guard. 

Those are kind of specific examples, but those happened fairly soon after I came home, so those are the things that come to mind. A third thing is again the DC crime bill — DC had a criminal code that was about 100-years-old. It needed to be updated, partly because many of its references were antiquated. This was largely an apolitical process that had been happening by committee for many years. What I saw when I moved back was that Republicans in the House — in order to posture for their own constituencies — many of them chose to vote down this criminal code revision in order to appear tougher on crime. They did this not because they were seeking to represent the interests of District residents, but rather because they wanted to gain repute with their constituency back home. 

What does achieving statehood mean for you? 

Statehood means a lot of things. The most basic thing that Statehood allows is full representation or autonomy. DC pays higher per capita taxes than nearly any other state or jurisdiction in the United States, and yet, we lack legislative representation. As a native Washingtonian, in my time living here, I’ve never had full representation in the House or representation in the Senate. This is something most people take for granted, but something I have wanted my whole life — the right to have a vote. 

The second thing it gives us is legislative Home Rule, the ability to make rules for ourselves. Again, something most people take for granted, but in DC, we see occasionally our laws are overturned, and even when they’re not overturned, we often have to write laws in anticipation of the possibility that they could be. I can give you a long list of the kinds of laws that either have been overturned or the kinds of laws that we have to carefully craft so that they won’t be overturned. What this means is that the people I vote for — the District of Columbia Council — can’t actually make laws that reflect my own wishes. 

The third thing to think about is DC’s limited form of representation — we have a delegate in the House who doesn’t have full voting rights, we have a council and a mayor — these things are guaranteed only by statute and can be taken away at any point. In fact, we’ve seen this if we look through DC’s history — there have been moments in which District residents have been granted measures of autonomy, only to see them removed. It’s worth bringing that up now, because as we see members of Congress, especially in the U.S. House, are increasingly hostile to the District’s government, and some have even proposed removing the District government entirely, which would leave someone like me permanently disenfranchised. 

What do you think needs to be done to get closer to achieving statehood?
 

We’re closer than we’ve ever been to Statehood. The District has had a long history of pushing for Statehood, coming close, then falling just short at various periods in its history. In the last Congress, we were only two or three votes short in the U.S. Senate, and the reason for that is because right now, the Senate is narrowly divided and because Democrats see the possibility in DC of two additional Democratic senators. Now, there is no guarantee District residents would vote for Democrats, and the right of District residents to vote should not be conditional on partisan politics, but Democrats right now seem to be taking more seriously this problem, in part because it benefits the party nationally. What this means is that to get us across the finish line for Statehood, we need only a few more votes in the U.S. Senate and a few votes in the House — Republicans have a very narrow U.S. House majority and Democrats need only one or two extra votes in the Senate in addition to the current majority to push a Statehood bill through. We’re closer now than we have been in any other period in our history to getting Statehood, it just means we need a few more votes in both houses of Congress.