On September 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, devastating the island and plunging its 3.3 million residents into a humanitarian crisis that continues to this day.

Since Maria struck six months and ten days ago, an estimated 100,000 Puerto Ricans still live without electricity.

New outages continue. On April 19, a bulldozer hit a power line while trying to remove a collapsed transmission tower and left 1.1 million households without power. A week earlier a tree fell on a crucial power line and knocked out power to 840,000 people.

Puerto Rico is trying hard to recover from this devastation, but bureaucratic indifference that would never be tolerated in the United States is making it harder for Puerto Rico than Texas and Florida.

It took over a month for Congress to pass a disaster relief bill that included $4.9 billion in low-interest Treasury Department loans to help the Puerto Rico pay salaries and other expenses needed to avoid a shutdown of its government. Then Steve Mnuchin, U.S. Treasury secretary arbitrarily slashed the amount to $2 billion, and, until March 22 of this year, withheld those funds.

Scandal surrounded Puerto Rico’s first step toward restoring its electrical grid when a $300 million no-bid contract to rebuild the grid was awarded to Whitefish Energy, a two-year-old Montana company with ties to Ryan Zinke, Secretary of the Interior Department, but no staff. Whitefish hired subcontractors and paid linemen $63 an hour and billed Puerto Rico’s electrical utility $319 an hour.

Whitefish Energy is backed by HBC Investments, whose founder and general partner Joe Colonnetta gave $33,000 to the campaign of then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who is now Energy secretary. Colonnetta and his wife gave $28,200 to President Trump.

It is past time to make Puerto Rico a state
Puerto Rico has been a U.S. territory since 1898; Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens. Puerto Rico is a self-governed commonwealth with two parties: Republican and Democratic. But citizens of Puerto Rico cannot vote in U.S. elections because Puerto Rico is not a state.

The U.S. Constitution does not define how a state joins the Union. Here is how the two most recent states did it:

• Alaska became a U.S. possession when it was purchased from Russia in 1867. In 1946, Alaskans voted in favor of statehood in a referendum, and Alaskan delegates began to lobby Congress for statehood. After years of debate, Congress voted in June 1958 to admit Alaska by a simple majority vote. On Jan. 3, 1959, President Eisenhower signed a proclamation admitting Alaska to the Union as the 49th state.
• Hawaii became a U.S. protectorate a year after a division of U.S. Marines deposed Queen Liluokalani in 1893. It became a U.S. territory in 1900. In 1959, the U.S. Congress approved statehood for Hawaii by a simple majority vote; 93% of the Hawaiian people voted to accept admittance into the United States. On August 21, 1959, President Dwight Eisenhower signed a proclamation admitting Hawaii into the Union as the 50th state.

Given that reality, I ask that my elected Democratic senators and representative remember Puerto Rico the next time the stars align. Let's stop doing democracy with one hand tied behind our backs while the other party comes at us with a chain saw. But be prepared: Republicans will whine and cry about how Democrats are tyrannical and acting like dictators. Sean Hannity might have a heart attack. Regardless, don't give up. Don't ever give up.

Puerto Rico has already voted five times to become a state. The most recent vote was less than a year ago.

In January, Puerto Rico sent a “shadow” non-voting seven-member congressional delegation to Congress in the same way that Alaska did as part of its process of becoming a state.

As America’s first Republican president said, “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”

Our current division has been growing for a long time - since Richard Nixon played his Southern Strategy - and is aided by structural imbalances in the U.S. Constitution:

• Two senators for each state. That may have worked in 1789 but today it gives more representation to people in rural states like Wyoming than populous states like New York.
• The Electoral College, designed to protect slavery, has cost Democrats the Presidency twice in 16 years.
• The Constitution leaves the designing of Congressional districts to the states, and Republican statehouses and governors have used that latitude to gerrymander districts and solidify their hold.

To correct the structural imbalances built into the U.S. Constitution, we would need to amend it to eliminate the Electoral College, change the way senators are assigned and prohibit gerrymandering. That's a big lift and in no way guaranteed to succeed.

But we can, by a simple majority vote in both houses of Congress and a proclamation by the president, change the balance in the Senate by admitting Puerto Rico as a state.

When voters see that democracy is not working for them, they become non-voters or vote for authoritarians like our current so-called president. We are too close to the death of democracy.

And, while we’re at it, let's make Washington D.C. a state, too.