I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Monday, April 26th.

One Republican senator considering a White House run in 2024 piqued the anger of one of the newly elected House

members from New York last week. The issue was the bill that the House just passed that would make

Washington, D.C. a state. Here's what Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas said about that.

Wyoming is smaller than Washington by population, but it has three times as many workers

in mining, logging, and construction, and ten times as many workers in manufacturing.

In other words, Wyoming is a well-rounded working-class state.

A new state of Washington would not be. It was that last point that Wyoming

is a well-rounded working-class state. You hear that phrase? And D.C. is not, that freshman Congressman

Mondair Jones of Westchester and Rockland took strong issue with. I have had enough of my colleagues' racist insinuations that somehow the people of

Washington, D.C. are incapable or even unworthy of our democracy. One Senate Republican said

that D.C. wouldn't be a, quote, well-rounded working-class state.

I had no idea there were so many syllables in the word white.

Congressman Mondare Jones, he later agreed to withdraw that remark based on the House decorum

tradition of not labeling other members of Congress like that, but he still insisted

Senator Cotton's position was based on fear

that his party's white supremacist politics will no longer play. We'll talk about D.C. statehood now

and the Washington D.C. Admission Act that did pass the House last week with the sponsor of the

bill, D.C.'s non-voting member of the House of Representatives,

Eleanor Holmes-Norton. For some of you not familiar with her career, Eleanor Holmes-Norton,

had already been a prominent civil rights attorney, Fortune 500 company board member and chair

of the federal government's Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under President

...