Senator Van Hollen of Maryland is renewing the push for statehood for the Columbia District. He’s co-sponsoring, with 40 of his fellow Democrats, a bill to grant statehood to the district. Yet even if it passes, it faces obstacles in the Constitution. A more open road could be retrocession of residential areas to Maryland. 

“Every American should have a full vote in our country’s future,” Mr. Van Hollen writes in a statement announcing his bill and the House version earlier this month, “but we fall short of this promise every day that the residents of the District of Columbia are denied that right in Congress.” 

Mr. Van Hollen invoked the Revolutionary War slogan, “No taxation without representation.” In 1820’s Loughborough vs. Blake, though, Chief Justice Marshall ruled that it was the duty of citizens to pay taxes. “Representation,” he wrote of the District, “is not made the foundation of taxation.” 

Outside the Beltway, support for D.C. statehood has always been sparse. Only 16 states ratified the District of Columbia Voting Rights Amendment of 1978 before it expired. It would have repealed the 23rd Amendment, which gave the District Electoral College votes.

That bill had bipartisan backing in Congress. Maryland and Virginia, which opposed the creation of a powerful new entity next-door, objected. Today, Democrats outnumber Republicans two-to-one in the District, sinking the chances of gaining GOP support.

Nevertheless, District residents pine for representatives in Congress. They’ve voted for president since 1964, following ratification of the 23rd Amendment. They’ve elected mayors and city councils since 1974 but only send a non-voting delegate to Capitol Hill. Congress has final say over laws and budgets.

The District’s unique governance is by design. To avoid giving to any one state outsized influence over the federal government, Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution grants Congress the power to “exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever” in its capital city.

The arrangement, as President Madison writes in 43 Federalist, wasn’t meant to disenfranchise. Instead, he felt proximity to what Washington called “the Federal City” would ensure lawmakers addressed locals’ concerns.

The states “ceding” territory, Madison wrote, would “no doubt provide in the compact for the rights and the consent of the citizens inhabiting it … as they will have had their voice in the election of the government which is to exercise authority over them.”

The Constitution mandates a capital created “by cession of particular states” and in 1790, Congress empowered President Washington to select its location. He claimed territory of Virginia and Maryland, which became the seat of the federal government in 1801.

Article I stated that the capital would be an area “not exceeding ten miles square,” and Washington chose swampland with few residents. Over time, the population grew, boosted before the Civil War when Congress outlawed slavery and Black Americans fled there for freedom.

The District is now home to almost 680,000 residents, more than Vermont and Wyoming. The Admissions Clause of the Constitution forbids the creation of new states from regions of another without its ascent. Maryland’s legislature would likely have to agree to a muddled transfer of ownership.

Glancing at a map of the Columbia District today illuminates a possible solution. The capital city is no longer the complete square Washington sketched because, in 1846, Congress returned Virginia’s portion. This retrocession gave residents the full representation that Mr. Van Hollan’s bill advocates.

But even the constitutionality of that retrocession has been questioned. The Contract Clause forbids states to breach deals, and Virginia agreed to “forever cede and relinquish” territory. Yet it’s a precedent: Returning residential areas and shrinking the District again to areas that conduct federal business.

“Retrocession to Maryland makes a lot of sense,” Congressman Thomas Davis of Virginia said in a 1998 interview with the Washington Post, “except that Maryland doesn’t want” it. He said that the then-attorney general, a Democrat, further held that “an amendment is the only way for Maryland to take it back.”

Despite the uphill climb, Democrats are chasing the dream of gaining two safe Senate seats. That there are no GOP co-sponsors of Mr. Van Hollan’s bill indicates that, in addition to the constitutional obstacles, his bill would serve political goals rather than enfranchise citizens in the District.

Mr. Van Hollen, in his statement, notes that he timed his bill “at the beginning of two years under a Republican-held Congress and presidency.” He recognized “a challenge in the short term” to make it law, indicating that the most likely outcome is feeding a perennial campaign issue. 

Another tell that politics is at play is that a common objection on the left — that the Senate is undemocratic because the “Great Compromise” gives large and small states equal representation in the upper chamber — isn’t invoked when it comes to adding the star of tiny D.C. to the flag. 

“No Taxation Without Representation,” the motto on District  license plates, will prove a powerful political slogan for Democrats, but the Constitution requires a federal district.