Statehood would also strip Congress of its right to overturn the District of Columbia’s laws and control its budget, as outlined in the Constitution. Representative Andy Harris, Republican of Maryland, angered district residents this year when he tried to block a new law decriminalizing marijuana possession in some cases.

Officials said the District of Columbia — which, with a population of 646,000, has more people than Vermont and Wyoming, according to the Census Bureau estimate for 2013 — is unjustly subject to lawmakers’ whims and forced to close its government during federal shutdowns.

“We were casualties of national politics,” Mr. Gray said.

Critics argue that statehood would give the District of Columbia an unfair advantage over more populous states and other cities. Roger Pilon, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Constitutional Studies, told the committee the “proposal is not only unconstitutional but impractical as well.”

District officials have been pushing a statehood bill since the first one was introduced in 1983, but it had been more than 20 years since lawmakers held a hearing on the matter.

Senator Thomas R. Carper, Democrat of Delaware and chairman of the committee, introduced the latest bill last year. It would keep federal property like the White House and the Capitol under congressional control but would grant statehood to the rest of the District, which would be known as New Columbia.