Statehood for Washington, D.C., is getting a Senate committee hearing on Tuesday, two months after the House passed the legislation on a party line vote. And the hearing at the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will include a very surprising advocate for statehood: former committee chair Joe Lieberman.

In addition to testifying before the committee, Lieberman will personally appeal to Republicans and conservative Democrats, trading on his own history as “somebody who worked very hard across party lines—and sometimes to my detriment in my own party,” as he told Roll Call. That’s one way to put it.

”I’d hoped that at a time when unfortunately there’s too much racial division in our society again that adopting statehood for the District would be one way to close the gap, mend the tears,” Lieberman said, apparently not understanding that Republicans don’t want that. Statehood for the plurality-Black District would help change the fact that, in the U.S., “The average Black American voting power is only 75 percent as much representation as the average white American in the Senate and a 55 percent to the Hispanic voter.” The current state of affairs helps maintain Republican power, and Republicans are all about holding on to power by any means available.

Statehood would also have made a major difference in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, because the order for the Washington, D.C. National Guard to activate would have been under local control, not left waiting for hours while the Defense Department and Trump White House allowed the attack to continue. That’s not the only major recent event in which Washington, D.C., has been denied equal treatment, the District’s government noted in making the case for statehood: “While our population is larger than that of both Vermont and Wyoming, under the CARES Act, the District was denied $755 million in emergency funds, which is the amount provided to the least populous state through the Coronavirus Relief Fund.”

The statehood bill would reduce the size of the federal district—the part not given the full rights of statehood—to the immediate surroundings of the White House, Capitol Hill, the Supreme Court, and the National Mall, and turn the rest of the current Washington, D.C., into the State of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth, honoring Frederick Douglass.

Republicans are literally using one form of minority rule—the filibuster—to preserve another—a Senate that gives as many votes to the less than 600,000 people in Wyoming as the more than 39 million people in California, and gives zero votes to the 700,000 people in Washington, D.C. Republicans like it that way, because justice matters not at all to them.