D.C. has never had such good friends in Congress. On April 22, the House passed a bill to grant statehood to the District, sending the legislation to the Senate, where 45 Democrats have already signed on as co-sponsors.
Some Republican lawmakers, too, have voiced their support for D.C. residents’ long-standing efforts to gain voting representation in Congress. Yet they reject statehood as a “power grab” by congressional Democrats who simply want two more safely Democratic seats in a tightly contested Senate. These Republicans advocate an alternative solution: Ask Maryland to absorb the District through a process called “retrocession.”
Retrocession would require Maryland to take back, or “retrocede,” most of the 68 square miles of territory that it gave up in 1790 to create the federal seat of government. (Virginia also provided roughly 32 acres of its territory on the western bank of the Potomac River, but that land—including the city of Alexandria and Arlington County—was retroceded back to Virginia in 1846.)