True Left

Republican lawmakers blew up on Thursday after Democratic Rep. Mondaire Jones accused the GOP of spreading "racist trash" during a heated debate over a bill to grant statehood to Washington, DC.

"I've had enough of my colleagues' racist insinuations that somehow the people of Washington, DC, are incapable or even unworthy of our democracy," Jones said on the House floor.

He then called out Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas for saying DC wouldn't be a "well-rounded working-class state."

"I had no idea there were so many syllables in the word 'white,'" Jones said.

He also pointed out Republican Rep. Jody Hice's claim that Washington, DC, does not deserve statehood because it doesn't have a landfill.

"My goodness, with all the racist trash my colleagues have brought to this debate, I can see why they're worried about having a place to put it," Jones continued, as Republicans could be heard objecting to his comments. "The truth is there is no good-faith argument for disenfranchising over 700,000 people, Mr. Speaker, most of whom are people of color."
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the history of opposition to federal representation for Washington, DC, is rooted in anti-Black racism. Confederate lawmakers explicitly rejected DC's various attempts to self-govern and elect its own representation because of its large Black population.

"In the face of this influx of negro population from the surrounding States, [Congress] … found it necessary to disenfranchise every man in the District of Columbia … in order thereby to get rid of this load of negro suffrage that was flooded in upon them," Sen. John Tyler Morgan of Alabama, who owned slaves, said in 1890.

Morgan explained that Congress got rid of local leadership in the city "to burn down the barn to get rid of the rats … the rats being the negro population and the barn being the government of the District of Columbia."

It wasn't until the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 70s that the city was given the right to elect its own mayor and non-voting House member.