Obama endorses statehood for Washington, DC (and, presumably, its 2 prospective Democratic senators)

At a town hall event in the U.S. capital on Monday, President Obama unequivocally endorsed making Washington, D.C., the 51st U.S. state. "I'm in D.C., so I'm for it," he said in response to an audience question. "Folks in D.C. pay taxes like everybody else. They contribute to the overall well-being of the country like everybody else. They should be represented like everybody else."

The president went on to note that population-wise, the tiny District of Columbia is actually larger than Wyoming and Vermont, and isn't that much smaller than six other states. But making D.C. a state isn't in Obama's power — two-thirds of Congress would have to approve the idea, or two-thirds of state legislatures could call a Constitutional convention, The Daily Caller's Neil Munro explains. And though he thinks "it's absolutely the right thing to do," Obama said, "the politics of it end up being difficult to get it through Congress."

There are a lot of reasons that's true, but one of them is certainly that the 51st state of Washington, D.C., would almost certainly send two Democrats to the Senate and one to the House.

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