They’d have to rescind that via amendment as well right?
I’m not a Constitutional scholar by any means, though I did teach the Constitution to Jr High students going through it line by line for over 20 years, so I do have an idea of what’s in there. I believe to grant statehood to the District would require a lot of changes to the Constitution, which the pro statehood people either seem to ignore or brush off as no big deal.
The Founders did not want the Federal government to be under the control of a state government which at some point might be hostile to it. Imagine if the capital was located in, say NYC, Chicago or San Francisco right now. For a bunch of old white guys who lived 200 years ago, the Founders were pretty smart.