That doesn't make any sense. The US already did that.

It's a matter of undoing it or giving it equal status with states, not a matter of claiming control of the territory.

For how it got that way, Spain agreed to succeeded it to end of the Spanish-American war.

The thought that "people aren't supposed to live here" makes no difference to the matter; people do live there, a lot of people, more than the entire states of Wyoming and Vermont, and without those residents the government would cease to function.

It would be feasible to enfranchise the citizens of DC by granting statehood while also maintaining the original intent of the city, by requiring the new state constitution to yield all physical security to the authority of the federal government.

Then return the parts of the current district on which residences (other than official government ones like the White House) sit to the original states.

Because people do, in fact, live in D.C., and those people are currently governed (and taxed) without representation in the federal legislature.

[1] As noted below, a significant fraction of the African American population live in D.C. because their ancestors were brought here involuntarily. They should be permitted to vote.

That overstates the matter. The federal government was incapable of defending the District militarily against the states, because it intentionally had no significant standing army at the time the District was ceded to it [0]. Even after the U.S. Army started to take shape — mainly for service on the frontier, not at the national capital — it's doubtful that the District could have resisted invasion by the militia of even one of its state neighbors; this is indirectly evidenced by the ease with which the British took and burned Washington in 1814.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_A...

Although it runs into the problem that Virginia and Maryland don't want it.

The only people with a rational (short-term, at least) interest in D.C. representation is D.C. residents, and they don't get a vote, or even a vote for people who get a vote.

This strikes me as a very truthy claim. I'd expect the vast majority of people to be utterly indifferent to paying Virginia or Maryland to absorb parts of DC. They might say otherwise in a poll, but they'd act like it never happened when they next voted.

DC statehood would also help mitigate the distortive effect of allocating 2 Senators to every state regardless of population, which exaggerates the rural vote.

The Senate wasn’t designed to represent “the people” anyway, it was designed to represent the interests of the sovereign states — of which DC is not. The House of Representatives is what represents “the people.”

There is a persistent and fundamental lack of understanding of the US government by many people, case in point is the complete ignorance about the purpose of both the Senate and the electoral college. The US is a federal republic, not a democracy.

This has nothing to do with Republicans and Democrats, but with the Constitution.

https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/migrated/poladv/...

This was how it was designed, and if state congresses still elected federal senators, this argument against DC having senate representation would hold water. Once the 17th Amendment changed it to direct election of senators, the chamber no longer represented the interests of the state, it now just gives the people in less populous states a lot more influence over the law.

The USA clearly is a democracy, since it has democratic elections. Specifically, it is a representative democracy. I have no idea why anyone thinks being a federation and/or being a republic are somehow in opposition to this. The three concepts are completely orthogonal.

I can see that the context doesn't fit with today's ideas and definitions of how our country's government works, but that is exactly how the country was set up in the beginning.

And over time it has evolved to directly represent the people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Amendment_to_the_U...

We have 27 reasons to think the constitution as designed was imperfect, and at least one reason to think the representation of DC was flawed. I'm sure we can add more.

[Note] Also, such an amendment has already been sent to the states and failed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_Voting_Ri...

D.C. was created as a compromise, deliberately set aside as a federal region, so no state would have control over the capital. It seems a reasonable thing to keep it as such.