A city in Maryland should not get to be its own state.

Not everything the founders did makes sense now, and one of those things is Washington D.C.

Not the city party.  You need a seat of government and that's going to be a big city.

No, the "District of Columbia" part.

Look, I get the reasons for it.  It was a really big country when it was founded and the founders were worried about boosting the power of a state that housed the national government.  Okay, made sense at the time, although it was probably a little paranoid frankly.  Does it make sense now?

Not so much.

The idea, of course, is that a reservation of Federal land is by nature a Federal Reservation, and Washington D.C. is sort of a super reservation.  Originally, the founders thought of Federal power applying to a very limited number of things it was reserving to itself.  Forts, some port facilities, things like that.

Well, that didn't work out and there's a lot more than just that, and that's fine, but the capital of the country doesn't need to be a super reservation that's separate from the state its in, which is Maryland.  And making it a state is just moronic.

The argument is that it has a lot of people and no representation.  Well, it does have a lot of people, around 700,000, but making it a state would not only defeat the original purpose of making it a Federal reservation, it'd actually go exactly the opposite way, making a city that exists on nothing other than Federal largess a state.  

Washington D.C., as a state, would have interests obviously completely separate from the rest of the country's on everything, that one interest being the interest of the government itself.  Big infrastructure bill, they'd be for it every time.  Create a Bureau of Tabbies and Norwegian Forest Cats?  They'd be for that too.  Whatever it is, as long as it was the Federal government, they'd be game. That's the town's only product.

Warren Air Force Base is a Federal Reservation in Wyoming and people who live there get to vote in the state's elections. Why? It's in the state.

Ft. Riley is a Federal Reservation and the people who live there get to vote in Kansas' elections. Why, well its in Kansas.

You get the point.

No other large nation has taken the approach the somewhat paranoid founders of the U.S. did.  St. Petersburg was the capital of Imperial Russia and it was not its own special district. When the capital was moved to Moscow, it didn't become one.  Berlin is some German federal reservation inside of Germany.  Paris hasn't been separated from France.  London isn't separate from the United Kingdom.  Dublin isn't separate from Ireland.  Ottawa in in Ontario.

Is it unfair that Washingtonians don't get to vote in congressional elections?  No, not really.  That was the entire idea.  And making Washington D. C. a state wouldn't increase fairness, it'd defeat it for the reasons mentioned above.

Want to give Washingtonians a say in Congress?  Make the city party of Maryland.  Yes, that would mean that Washingtonians would only be 700,000 out of some 7,000,000 in that state, but that's fair.