section_path: History/Statehood movement
section_name: Statehood movement
paragraph_text: Statehood movement
  
  Since the 1980s, the D.C. statehood movement has grown in prominence. In 2016, a referendum on D.C. statehood resulted in an 85% support among Washington, D.C., voters for it to become the nation's 51st state. In March 2017, the city's congressional delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton introduced a bill for statehood. Reintroduced in 2019 and 2021 as the Washington, D.C., Admission Act, the U.S. House of Representatives passed it in April 2021. After not progressing in the Senate, the statehood bill was introduced again in January 2023. The bill would have made D.C. into a state with one representative and two senators, with the name Washington, Douglass Commonwealth (thus keeping the same abbreviation Washington, D.C.). The legalities, reasons, and impact of statehood have been heavily debated in the 2020s.