This is an adapted excerpt from the Aug. 16 episode of “Velshi.”

Last week, Donald Trump essentially took control of Washington, D.C.’s law enforcement, activating the National Guard, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to carry out what he calls an effort to crack down on crime in the city.

The reason Trump was able to commandeer D.C. so easily is that it has no governor and no formal congressional representation to put a stop to it. The president’s takeover has now reignited the conversation around D.C. statehood.

The District of Columbia was established by the Constitution, carved out of Maryland and Virginia, as an explicitly neutral site to conduct government business that would not be a part of or beholden to any one state.

Residents of D.C. have never had voting representation in Congress. They instead elect one nonvoting delegate to the House, who has floor and committee privileges but cannot vote on final legislation. They also elect one shadow representative and two shadow senators, who do not work in Congress but work as advocates for statehood.

Residents can vote for a mayor and other city officials, but that wasn’t always the case. In the city’s early years, the mayor was appointed by the president. In 1820, Congress amended D.C.’s charter to allow only white male landowners to vote for the city’s mayor. In 1848, that right was extended to include all white men. In 1867, during Reconstruction, it was extended to Black men in D.C.

In 1871, though, amid a debt crisis in Washington, President Ulysses S. Grant signed a bill that restructured the city’s government around a governor and legislative council appointed by the president. In 1874, Congress created a new system where the city would be run by three presidentially appointed commissioners. This was meant to be temporary, but was made permanent in 1878.

D.C. residents were not given the right to vote in presidential elections until 1961, with the ratification of the 23rd Amendment to the Constitution.

Then, in 1973, President Richard Nixon signed the Home Rule Act, a law allowing D.C. residents to elect their own city government for the first time in a century.

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But, to this day, the city remains heavily federalized. Judges and the U.S. attorney of D.C., the city’s chief prosecutor, are federally appointed. The city’s laws and budget are subject to congressional approval. And, bringing us to our current situation, the National Guard can be deployed and the D.C. Metropolitan Police can be brought under federal control without the local government’s approval.

D.C. residents have advocated for statehood for decades. Legislation to make Washington the 51st state first went up for a House vote in 1993, where it lost handily. In June 2020, the House voted again after the Trump administration’s deployment of the National Guard to respond to Black Lives Matter protests. It passed in the Democratic-controlled House but was not brought to a vote by the Republican-led Senate. The bill passed in the House again in April 2021, but once again, failed to make it to a Senate vote.

If D.C. were to become a state, it would have two senators and one at-large representative in the House. By geographic area, it would be the smallest state by far. However, its population is larger than that of Vermont or Wyoming, and not far off from that of Alaska. D.C. residents pay the highest per-capita federal taxes in the country, and more taxes in total than residents of 22 other states.

It is true that, given the current political leanings of the city, D.C. statehood would all but guarantee two more Democratic senators and one more Democratic member of the House. That is why Republicans are so against it.

But right now, as Trump floods the streets of D.C. with troops, we’re seeing the consequences of allowing a city of over 700,000 people — more than Boston, Detroit or Atlanta — to be deprived of the basic rights of self-governance and political representation that most of us take for granted.