it out of committee. Amendment process Given the potential constitutional problems with legislation granting the District voting representation in Congress, scholars have proposed that amending the U.S. Constitution would be the appropriate manner to grant D.C. full representation. District of Columbia Voting Rights Amendment In 1978, Congress proposed the District of Columbia Voting Rights Amendment. Under this amendment, the District of Columbia would have been "treated as though it were a State" regarding congressional representation, presidential elections (replacing the limited treatment under the Twenty-third Amendment), and the constitutional amendment process. The amendment had to be ratified within seven years to be adopted. The amendment was ratified by only 16 states, short of the requisite three-fourths (38) of the states, and so it expired in 1985. The amendment has never been resubmitted for ratification. Murkowski proposal Senator Lisa Murkowski- (R-AK) believed the District of Columbia House Voting Rights Act of 2009 would be unconstitutional if adopted, and so she proposed a constitutional amendment to provide the District with one representative. Unlike the District of Columbia Voting Rights Amendment, Murkowski's proposal would not have provided the District any Senators or a role in the constitutional amendment process. Her proposal was referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which never acted on the proposal. Statehood Article IV, Section 3, Clause 1 of the Constitution gives Congress power to grant statehood. If the District were to become a state, congressional authority over the District would be terminated, and residents would have full voting representation in both houses of Congress. However, there are some constitutional considerations with any such statehood proposal. In 1980, local citizens passed an initiative calling for a constitutional convention for a new state. In 1982, voters ratified the constitution of a new state to be called "New Columbia". This campaign for statehood stalled. After the District of Columbia Voting Rights Amendment expired in 1985, another constitution for the state of New Columbia was drafted in 1987. The House of Representatives voted on D.C. statehood in November 1993, and the proposal was defeated by a vote of 277 to 153. Like retrocession, it has been argued that D.C. statehood would erode the principle of a separate federal territory as the seat of the federal government and that a constitutional amendment would be needed to avoid a violation of the Constitution's District Clause. On April 15, 2016, District Mayor Muriel Bowser called for a