What in the World Is a Shadow Senator?

It may be the only job of its kind in the country: a political position, elected by the people, with no actual political power. In this office, there’s no voting. No executive decisionmaking. No budget, no committee assignments, no hand in making legislation. It’s also completely unpaid.

The position is D.C. shadow senator, part of a delegation to Congress that serves as a consolation prize for the nearly 700,000 residents who have no actual representation in the Capitol. Unlike the D.C. nonvoting delegate in the House—since 1991, Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton—the district’s two shadow senators and one shadow representative cannot serve on committees or speak on the floor of the House or Senate. Instead, they’re elected to lobby actual senators and members of Congress on behalf of D.C.’s interests.

One of D.C.’s two shadow senator slots is up for election this year. Voting rights lawyer Ankit Jain won the Democratic primary in June, which in D.C. is the real battle. He’ll all but certainly win Tuesday’s vote. Previously an environmental litigator at the Sierra Club, Jain currently works as an attorney at FairVote, a job he’ll keep if elected.

Jain has been involved in the movement for D.C. statehood for several years, but he decided to run for this position only after seeing his predecessor exhibit what he calls “a failure of leadership” when Congress moved to overturn a law passed by the D.C. Council in early 2023. It was supposed to be the city’s new criminal code, revised in a painstaking 16-year process for the first time in a century, then passed by the council. Instead of mounting an aggressive campaign to defend D.C.’s self-governance in the face of congressional meddlers, current shadow Sen. Michael D. Brown—who is retiring after 17 years in the role—sat back and blamed the D.C. Council for the Republican-led attacks.

If he wins, Jain says, he’ll make a stronger, more strategic case for D.C.’s right to make its own laws. We talked about what a Trump presidency could do to shackle the D.C. government, the near-term likelihood of D.C. statehood, and how Jain intends to influence legislators with no material leverage. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Christina Cauterucci: What is a shadow senator? What’s your elevator pitch for what you’re going to be doing?

Ankit Jain: We’re D.C.’s main advocate for statehood and against congressional efforts to attack our local laws and meddle in our local affairs—basically, our elected lobbyist for our rights and our issues before Congress and the U.S. Senate.

I’ll just give you one example. Donald Trump keeps on saying he’s going to do a federal takeover of D.C. if he’s elected. Unfortunately, legally he can do that if he gets the bill passed through Congress. If unfortunately that does come to pass, which hopefully it does not, my job will be to organize the messaging, strategy, and campaign to stop that law from passing Congress. I’ll take the meetings with senators and their staff to get them to vote no on something like that.

Why would anyone in the Senate listen to a shadow senator? You don’t have much leverage. You don’t have money or votes to threaten to withhold.

I do think that it can be helpful for members of Congress and their staff to get basic information about what is going on in D.C. We are elected by the people of D.C., and I think that holds weight. I don’t think this is their main concern, but I think that members of Congress voting on this bill, they do care—a little bit at least—about “Hey, what does D.C. actually want with this law that is impacting only them?” To be able to say, “I was elected by the people of D.C. Here’s their perspective on this issue”—I think that is helpful and powerful.

There is also an ability to get media attention to some of the stuff that’s going on. Obviously, members of Congress care what their media hits are saying. As members of Congress are thinking about attacking D.C.’s rights, I think it is helpful to point out to them, “Here is what we’re going to say if you do this, and how it’s going to impact you.”

I’ll give you one example. I had a meeting with a staff member for [Republican Alabama] Sen. Katie Britt. There’s a bill before the Senate introduced by [Republican Utah] Sen. Mike Lee to repeal D.C.’s Home Rule Act. I was pointing out to Britt, “Hey, if this bill passes and we abolish D.C.’s local government—well, now everything bad that happens in D.C. is your fault. You’d better believe that we’re going to be saying that.” I think the politics of it is helpful.

You decided to run after Congress overturned a D.C. law in early 2023. What happened there, and what would you have done differently?

I think of D.C. as almost a colony of the federal government. Any law we pass has to wait 30 to 60 legislative days to go into effect, for Congress to have the opportunity to veto it. So the Republicans got to work to veto this bill.

While I respect the work that [current shadow Sen.] Brown has done over the years, I think that on this issue, he didn’t take the right approach. He was putting out tweets blaming the D.C. Council for what was happening. I just think that that is not the job of the shadow senator to say, “Here’s what I think the local law should be.” I will defend every single law that the council passes, whether I agree with it or not, from congressional attack.

I also think that the strategy was very bad on this effort. We really made an argument on principle, which is that the people of D.C. should have a right to make their own laws. I 100 percent agree with that. But realistically, members of Congress don’t really care about that. We ceded the battleground on what the law actually did to Fox News. That’s how you had Kevin McCarthy go on national TV and say that D.C. has decriminalized carjackings, which is insane. Obviously we did not do that. Nobody challenged him. If we had talked more about how the penalty we have for carjacking is actually higher than in many states that have Republican congressmen and Republican senators, I think we could have maybe had a different outcome.

I’ve been thinking about what happens if Trump wins and Republicans take the Senate. Home rule is clearly top of mind for me, as someone who lives in D.C., and Trump has promised to “take over” D.C. if he’s elected. How good do you think the chances are that Republicans revoke D.C.’s ability to govern itself?

To repeal home rule, they would have to pass a law through Congress. You’d probably have to have a Republican trifecta control of government for that to even be an option. That theoretically would require a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. I think it’s a real risk, but I’m hopeful that that is not going to happen. Because either they’re going to have to vote to get rid of the filibuster or they’re going to have to get some Democrats behind them.

Even if they did vote to get rid of the filibuster, I’m not sure that this is something they actually want to take on. They talk about it because it’s good politics for them. But then you think about the reality of governing, being the municipal government for a pretty big city. Is that something that [Republican Alaska Sen.] Lisa Murkowski or [Republican Maine Sen.] Susan Collins or Britt really wants to take on? Every single shooting that happens in D.C., every single crime, every single problem is now their fault. We will definitely be blaming them for anything that happens.

The thing that worries me maybe a little bit more is: What could a President Trump do unilaterally? There was an article in the Washington Post recently about how Trump came very close to taking over our Metropolitan Police Department in his first term. And there’s a good chance he would try to do it this time. Unfortunately, the law is a little bit less likely to be able to stop him if he does that. So you can imagine him using the police department to suppress protests he doesn’t like, and [turning the department into] a more abusive police force that’s not respecting the residents in D.C. and respecting their rights.

Stuff like that scares me. There’s talk about—D.C. had a control board in the 1990s. The control board had basically full power over taxing and spending in D.C. The council could maybe pass a law, but the control board could just overturn it and do their own thing on taxing and spending. Apparently, the laws that created the control board are still on the books. There’s certain conditions that have to be met for the president to reappoint the control board, and my quick read of it is that Trump is not going to be able to meet the legal requirements to impose that. But he could try.

As far as statehood goes, there’s definitely been a lot more energy behind the movement in recent years. There was that landmark hearing in Congress a few years back. What are your 10-year-plan hopes that this could actually move forward in any significant way?

I think that’s a good time frame. I would say that this is likely in a 10-, 12-year time frame. The reason is: It just requires a bill. There doesn’t have to be a constitutional amendment or anything like that. The bill has already passed the House of Representatives twice.

I’ll work as hard as I can to get Republicans in Congress to realize the injustice and racism of denying the right to vote to over 700,000 American citizens, the majority of whom are people of color, a plurality of whom are Black. But D.C. statehood is most likely to happen when Democrats have full control of government. And Democrats will get full control of government at some point in the near- or medium-term future, because the pendulum always swings.

When that happens, I think that the bill will pass out of the House because it has already passed out of the House twice. In the Senate, I’m confident we’ll have a pro–D.C. statehood majority, because we have basically every Democrat on board except for [independent West Virginia Sen.] Joe Manchin and [independent Arizona Sen.] Kyrsten Sinema, who are both retiring. Along with the others in the statehood movement, I’ve been working with the national voting rights groups to create a voting rights package, including the Freedom to Vote Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, the Native American Voting Rights Act, and D.C. statehood.

The hope is that we can pass that package under the House, and then, in the Senate, get an exception to the filibuster for that whole package and pass it on a simple majority vote. Then have the president sign it into law. I think that this is likely to happen. If you look at the swing states’ Democrats, they all say that they support some sort of exceptions to the filibuster to pass important bills like voting rights, like abortion rights. Kamala Harris has already co-sponsored the bill, so I’m confident she would sign it.

Are there any other issues besides home rule and statehood that you’ll want to focus on?

We have something called the Height Act, where the federal government restricts how tall buildings can be in D.C. I think that that should not be decided by senators from Massachusetts and Wyoming. It should be up to our local government. I’ll be working to replace the federal Height Act with our own local Height Act. Hopefully, that’ll allow us to build more housing—and more affordable housing—to reduce the ridiculously high housing costs of D.C.