This inequity is the subject of my column today. By now, you probably know that I’m a fan of charts, and this column includes a big chart that I think tells the story especially clearly. (Thanks to my colleague Sahil Chinoy, who edited the charts and the column.)

As I argue, the Senate’s current white preferences are a strong argument for making Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., the 51st and 52nd states. They’re both home to American citizens who now have no voting power in Congress. Both are also mostly non-white. Granting them statehood wouldn’t eliminate the Senate’s racial imbalance, but it would reduce it.

For more on Puerto Rico and Washington in particular:

The Washington Monthly has run several articles making the case for statehood for both places, including one by Ben Paviour and a broader piece — on democratic reform — by Paul Glastris. “Since 1898, the United States has ruled the island as a colonial power,” Rebecca Pilar Buckwalter-Poza has written in Washington Monthly. “Puerto Ricans — all 3.3 million of them — are nominally American citizens, but have no representation in the federal government nor full constitutional protections.”

“The disastrous response by the federal government to the hurricane in Puerto Rico is really example No. 1,” Glastris told Hill.TV’s Krystal Ball. “If Puerto Rico were a state and had two senators, I can guarantee the federal government would not have been able to get away with the slow-walking of the response, and thousands of people might not have died.”

“Hurricane survivors who live on the island agree that the federal government would have responded differently to the disaster if Puerto Rico were a US state,” Alexia Fernández Campbell of Vox writes, citing survey data. And although some Puerto Ricans continue to oppose statehood, “all pre-Maria indications were that a majority of Puerto Ricans favored statehood,” as Rebecca Pilar Buckwalter-Poza has also written. Multiple former Republican presidents, like Ronald Reagan, also favored statehood for Puerto Rico if the island’s residents favored it. President Trump, however, is “an absolute no.”