Casting a long shadow? DC’s shadow delegation enters a new era

As this election cycle finally comes to a close, all eyes inside the Beltway will undoubtedly be on their phones and looking toward “the most important place on the battlefield,” as Paul Strauss put it: the shadow senator from the District of Columbia.

Strauss was joking, even though he takes his (unpaid) job as one of Washington’s two shadow senators quite seriously. As a shadow senator, he is an elected official tasked with advocating for D.C. statehood, a position he has held since 1997.

“They only really take you seriously in the Senate if you’ve been there for a few decades,” said Strauss, who will be elected in 2026. ‘I was sent there to do a job that took longer than I had hoped. would… but I’m not going to give up.”

For new DC residents, and even some older ones, filling out their ballot can feel confusingly repetitive. In addition to voting for DC’s representative to the House of Representatives – a position that Eleanor Holmes Norton has held since 1991 – they will asked to choose a “United States Senator” and “United States Representative” this year.

These positions constitute DC’s Shadow Delegation, which began in 1990 for the express purpose of pushing for statehood, and should Congress allow it, by creating an actual congressional delegation. It’s a process that some territories used before they became states. such as Tennessee and Alaska. Puerto Rico currently also has a shadow delegation.

While Norton and other representatives have limited power in Congress, the shadow senators and representatives do not, as they are not official members. They are not given an office, committee positions, access to the floor or votes there.

On Tuesday, Democrat Ankit Jain will likely be chosen to join Strauss as DC’s other shadow senator, along with incumbent shadow Rep. Oye Owolewa. About 90 percent of D.C. voters vote Democratic in most years, and Jain and Owolewa’s Republican opponents don’t really support statehood, which would make their ex-officio position on the D.C. State Commission awkward at best. The delegation shares an office in City Hall, along with a full-time employee and a handful of part-time assistants.

Jain, a voting rights attorney at FairVote, likened the position to being DC’s “chosen lobbyists for our issues before the U.S. Senate.”

“This position is, in fact, our leading advocate for DC statehood and against Congress’s efforts to overturn our local laws and meddle in our local affairs,” Jain said.

Jain is running for a seat held by Michael Donald Brown, who decided not to run for re-election after criticism for not doing more to deter Congress negate changes to DC’s criminal code in 2023. While DC has its own mayor and city council that writes laws, Congress has 30 to 60 days to review a law and can block it through a joint resolution signed by the president.

For proponents of local control like Strauss and Jain, that congressional “oversight” feels like an open disregard for the ideals of democracy.

“I truly believe in the power of democracy to solve the problems of this country,” Jain said. “The same democratic rights as every American citizen…all of us here in DC are being denied these rights.”

The 2023 incident particularly irked Jain. D.C. advocates made principled arguments, he said, about how unfair it was for people living thousands of miles from Washington to overturn the decision of the District’s elected officials. But that didn’t faze Republicans in Congress, who in his view were more interested in scoring political points against so-called soft-on-crime liberals, or against swing Democrats who feared these attacks would target them. would continue.

“I think realistically, members of Congress are less moved by those kinds of (principled) arguments than by… ‘What would voting for (DC) say about me?’” Jain said.

If elected, Jain said he would take a more pragmatic, strategic approach to convincing Congress to stay out of DC’s internal affairs.

But that work has become more difficult over the years, Strauss said, as politics has become more polarized. “There used to be much more mutual respect from both parties. When I first got there in the 1990s, even Republican senators were always willing to meet you in person,” he said. “For example, a very conservative man, Sam Brownback from Kansas, was chairman of the DC subcommittee (of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee), but he always made sure that if there was an issue about DC or a hearing that I had the chance to participate… even if we didn’t agree.

If Republicans are in power today, Strauss says, the task is more defensive in nature — trying to convince them not to roll back DC’s autonomy — rather than offensive, i.e. actually winning the state.

“Sometimes you have to be proactive. Sometimes you’re reacting to decisions made by people who live in other places but feel like they can control the District of Columbia, that it’s somehow their destiny,” Strauss said. “It becomes a challenge in such environments.”