President Trump has once again brought up the idea of statehood for Venezuela, as Fox News correspondent John Roberts reports in the video above. The president said to him in a phone call, Roberts says, “I’m serious about beginning a process to make Venezuela the 51st state”.
A process to make a new state
The process of making a new state involves a vote in Congress. Usually, there is an enabling act to allow the territory under consideration to make a Republican constitution. Then Congress votes on an admission act to admit the new state into the United States. Venezuela is not a territory of the United States, as Delcy Rodriguez pointed out, but an independent nation. The United States has admitted an independent nation in the past: Texas was a nation. Therefore, it did not have an enabling act. Rather, Congress passed a joint resolution admitting Texas as a state several years after Texas declared independence from Mexico.
Since World War II, it has been against international law to seize other countries, or even parts of other countries, and make them into parts of the invading nation. Conversations about new states focusing on Canada, Greenland, or Venezuela don’t fit into the legal process for making new states.
A 51st state?
That doesn’t mean that conversations about new states are unrealistic or inappropriate. A new state could be a way to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States. For a nation founded on government by the consent of the governed, however, invading sovereign nations and making them into states may not be the best way to accomplish it.
Instead, we could look to the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico already belongs to the United States. It has a population larger than many states. It uses the U.S. dollar and is fully integrated into the U.S. economy. Puerto Ricans have no citizenship by birth beyond U.S. citizenship. And its voters have chosen statehood in every status vote held in this century. The process for making Puerto Rico a state would be straightforward and honorable. Its constitution has already been approved by Congress, so Puerto Rico could simply be admitted to the U.S. through a vote by Congress.
