Casting a long shadow? DC's shadow delegation enters a new era

WASHINGTON — As this election cycle finally draws to a close, all eyes inside the Beltway will undoubtedly be glued to their phones watching “the most important battleground seat,” as Paul Strauss put it: the District of Columbia’s shadow senator.

Strauss was joking, even though he takes his (unpaid) job as one of Washington’s two shadow senators pretty seriously. As shadow senator, he is an elected official tasked with advocating for D.C. statehood, a position he has held since 1997.

“They don’t really take you seriously in the Senate until you’ve been there a few decades,” said Strauss, who’s next up for election in 2026. “I was sent there to do a job that’s taking longer than I hoped it would ... but I’m not going to give up.”

For new D.C. residents, and even some older ones, filling out their ballots can feel confusingly repetitive. In addition to voting for D.C.’s delegate in the House of Representatives — a position Eleanor Holmes Norton has held since 1991 — they will be asked to pick a “United States Senator” and “United States Representative” this year.

These positions make up D.C.’s shadow delegation, which began in 1990 with the express goal of pushing for statehood, and should Congress grant it, establishing an actual congressional delegation. It’s a process some territories used before they became states, like Tennessee and Alaska. Currently, Puerto Rico also has a shadow delegation.

While Norton and other delegates have limited power in Congress, the shadow senators and representatives have none, since they aren’t official members. They don’t get an office there, committee positions, access to the floor, or any votes.

On Tuesday, Democrat Ankit Jain will likely be elected to join Strauss as D.C.’s other shadow senator, along with incumbent shadow representative Oye Owolewa. Around 90 percent of D.C. votes Democrat in most years, and Jain and Owolewa’s Republican opponents don’t actually support statehood, which would make their ex officio positions on D.C.’s statehood commission awkward at the very least. The delegation shares an office in city hall along with a full-time staffer and a handful of part-time aides.

Jain, a voting rights attorney with FairVote, likened the position to being D.C.’s “elected lobbyists for our issues before the U.S. Senate.”

“This position is basically our main advocate for D.C. statehood and against congressional efforts to overturn our local laws and meddle in our local affairs,” Jain said.

Jain is running for a seat held by Michael Donald Brown, who decided not to run for reelection after criticism for not doing more to stop Congress from overturning changes to D.C.’s criminal code in 2023. While D.C. has its own mayor and city council that writes laws, Congress has 30 to 60 days to review a law and can block it via a joint resolution signed by the president.

To advocates for local control like Strauss and Jain, that congressional “oversight” feels like an overt slight against the ideals of democracy.

“I truly do believe in the power of democracy to solve this country’s problems,” Jain said. “The same democratic rights as every American citizen … all of us here in D.C. are denied those rights.”

The incident in 2023 particularly irked Jain. D.C.’s advocates made arguments on principle, he said, about how unfair it was for people who live thousands of miles away from Washington to overturn the decision of the district’s elected representatives. But that didn’t sway Republicans in Congress, who in his eyes were more interested in scoring political points against supposedly soft-on-crime liberals, or swing-district Democrats who were worried those attacks might stick on them.

“I think realistically, members of Congress are less moved by that kind of [principled] argument than by … ‘What would voting for [D.C.] say about me?’” Jain said.

If elected, Jain said he’d bring a more pragmatic, strategic approach to convincing Congress to stay out of D.C.’s internal affairs.

But that work has gotten harder over the years, Strauss said, as politics have grown more polarized. “There used to be a lot more mutual respect from both parties. When I first got there in the ’90s, even Republican senators would always be willing to meet with you in person,” he said. “A very conservative guy, Sam Brownback from Kansas, for example, used to chair the D.C. subcommittee [of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee], but he would always make sure that if there was an issue about D.C. or a hearing that I had a chance to participate … even when we disagreed.”

When Republicans are in power these days, Strauss said, the job is more defensive in nature — trying to convince them to not roll back D.C.’s autonomy — than offensive, i.e. actually winning statehood.

“Sometimes you get to be proactive. Sometimes you are reacting to decisions made by people who live in other places but feel that they can control the District of Columbia, that somehow it’s their destiny,” Strauss said. “It gets challenging in those environments.”