It’s no secret that Civil War political machinations drove Congress to hastily make Nevada a state in 1864, just eight days before President Lincoln’s reelection.

The lore is that Lincoln wanted Nevada for its vast silver deposits, to help finance the Union’s war effort. The truth was that statehood had very little to do with silver and almost everything to do with electoral votes and Senate seats.

As noted by Guy Rocha, Nevada’s former state archivist, Lincoln and the Union already had access to the silver because Nevada was a federal territory. Beyond that, the Civil War was rapidly winding down and the Confederacy was near defeat.

What Lincoln really wanted were Nevada’s prospective electoral votes and its votes in the Senate to pass the 13th amendment abolishing slavery. He also needed votes for his agenda on post-war reconstruction. Lincoln faced brutally close Senate margins on both.  That was the real battle for which our state was born.

“Nevada was singled out to help save the Union,” wrote Rocha, in one of his myth-busting articles on state history. “If Nevada were a state, it could ratify the [13th amendment] and help in the passage of the landmark humanitarian legislation.” 

We bring you this moment in Nevada history because Congress is now embroiled in a similar battle over granting statehood to the 712,000 residents of Washington, D.C. Much of the narrative against representation for D.C. residents – that it’s a political power play by Democrats – is eerily reminiscent of the fight over admitting Nevada into the Union.

This week, the House of Representatives will probably pass H.R. 51, which would make the non-federal parts of D.C. into the nation’s 51st state. The Senate will be a much tougher fight, though 44 Democrats – including our own Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto and Sen. Jacky Rosen – have signed onto the Senate’s companion bill.

Granting statehood to the District statehood is the right thing to do for the most basic of principles: voting rights, democratic representation and self-governance.

D.C. residents have no representation at all in the Senate and only a non-voting representative in the House, a spectacular breach of voting rights and a betrayal of democratic principles. It’s literally taxation without representation – and District residents pay higher federal taxes per capita than those of any other state.

But it’s also a barrier to local self-governance.

Congress routinely blocks District voters on entirely local issues -- sometimes to shortchange the city, and sometimes to score political points. Much like voters in Nevada, for example, D.C. voters passed a referendum several years ago to legalize recreational marijuana. But Republicans in Congress blocked the District from setting up a regulated marketplace and taxing sales. So while Nevada now has a thriving cannabis market that generates millions in tax revenue, D.C. is still on the sidelines.

That’s just one of many examples. Congress blocked a successful citizen referendum that required minimum wage for tipped workers. It forced the District to provide vouchers for private and religious schools. It prohibited the city from offsetting the cost of abortions for low-income residents.

Republican opponents of D.C. statehood complain that the move is nothing but a power play by Democrats to cement their control of the Senate. It’s true that D.C. is overwhelmingly Democratic, but so what?  Nevada in 1864 was solidly Republican. Lincoln had appointed many of the territory’s top officials. James Warren Nye, the territory’s governor, was vehemently hostile to the Confederacy. 

It’s also worth remembering Republicans politicized other statehood decisions that give them wildly disproportionate voting power today. We divided the Dakota Territory into two states, North and South, precisely because Republicans wanted to ensure an extra state in their column. Today, those two states have just a handful more residents than the District of Columbia. North Dakota has 760,000 people, and South Dakota has 892,000. Yet they control twice as many Senate seats as California with almost 40 million people.

Republicans also scoff that the District has too few residents to merit statehood. But D.C. currently has more residents than either Wyoming (578,000) and Vermont (623,000), and just marginally fewer than Alaska (735,000) or the Dakotas.  By the way, Nevada only had about 10,000 residents when it became a state – well below the requisite minimum at the time of 60,000.

It’s easy for people in the West to ignore D.C. statehood as somebody else’s problem. But it isn’t. It’s a matter of basic voting rights and democratic values, and it’s coming up at a time when Republicans are waging a nationwide campaign to suppress voting and representative democracy. Just this January, moreover, a majority of House Republicans and eight GOP senators voted to block the 2020 election results.

We should applaud our two senators, Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen, for signing on to the Senate’s D.C. statehood bill. We will all be better for it.

Edmund L. Andrews is a former economics reporter for The New York Times, and also worked as economics editor and deputy magazine editor at National Journal. He is now a writer based in Zephyr Cove.