With the 50-50 split we currently have to endure in the Senate, Republicans are once again having to rely on a select few Democrats to remain somewhat sane. That has boiled down to Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin becoming the bulwark against all sorts of left-wing hopes and dreams, with the most visible one being the filibuster that requires 60 votes on most legislative items.

Now, Manchin has nuked another push by Democrats. This time, it’s their attempts to make Washington D.C. a state.

A long-shot bid to pass a law that would make the District of Columbia the nation’s 51st state got a little longer on Friday. Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia said that effort would require a constitutional amendment. https://t.co/zyZkAknZle

— The Associated Press (@AP) April 30, 2021

Without nuking the filibuster, this wasn’t going anywhere in the first place. But Manchin coming out directly against it is another death knell, signaling that it’s not going to happen regardless of what machinations Chuck Schumer attempts over the next year and a half.

Manchin is also correct that it would require a constitutional amendment. It’s actually one of the clearest things the founders laid out in writing, i.e. that the federal district must not be a state.

Meanwhile, Democrats have the galaxy-brain idea of trying to separate the federal areas from the residential areas, but anyone that’s been there knows that’s not happening. There’s way too much inter-mingling. The federal buildings in Washington D.C. go well past the Capitol and the National Mall, and to allow them to exist in the new “residential” state of Washington D.C. would be doing exactly what the founders sought to stop. Of course, when have Democrats ever cared about that?

Past that, if you are going to have the federal government give up the land it took for their federal district, then why would that land not go back to the state it was taken from? In this case, that would be Maryland.

But really, I don’t even need to make any of these legal arguments. Washington D.C. doesn’t need to be a state because it’s a relatively small, crime-ridden dumpster fire of a city with no industry that is almost completely reliant on the employment of the federal government. Why would anyone want to make that a state? Yes, there are states with small populations, but they also have much bigger landmasses, industry, and natural resources to manage and speak for. There’s not another state in the union that would consist of a single city that’s not even ten miles across.

Heck, if we are going to do that, why not make Fort Worth a state? I mean, it’s bigger with more people. Why would you want to deny them their own representation?

We all know what D.C. statehood is. It’s a naked power attempt, which is why anyone who supports it gnashes their teeth at the idea of receding into Maryland. There is no justification for making D.C. a state outside of giving Democrats two permanent Senators. Manchin isn’t going to do that, thereby blowing himself up to make Chuck Schumer happy.