Blame racism first, read history later

Speaking in Washington DC, Rep. Diane Watson (D-Ca) blames racism:

Did you know your representatives can not vote? They can only vote in the committee as a whole. So what you’re going to have to do is declare the District [of Columbia] something like a state so they can have a proportional representation who vote. But that would give this district two senators and there are a lot of people on that floor who don’t want to see that occur because if there’s a chocolate city, this is it.

It was after much debate that the constitutional convention settled, as specified in Section 8, on locating the capitol in a district without the vote. They did that before the district existed let alone, as many decades later, it became "chocolate."