On Tuesday, April 21, 2026, Virginians voted. They approved a new congressional map, backed by Democrats, that was expected to expand the party's edge in the state's House delegation.

On Wednesday, April 22, Rich McCormick — a congressman from Georgia — filed a bill to remove roughly a quarter-million of those voters from Virginia entirely.

He called it the Make DC Square Again Act.

What the bill actually does

H.R. 8455 is two pages long, and the operative sentence is short. It repeals the Act of July 9, 1846, that returned Alexandria County to Virginia, and then:

"The territory retroceded under the Act repealed by subsection (a), consisting of the area now comprising Arlington County, Virginia, and the independent City of Alexandria, Virginia, is restored to, and shall constitute part of, the District of Columbia."

That's it. Arlington and Alexandria stop being Virginia and become Washington, D.C.

Here is what that means for the people who live there. Virginia sends two U.S. senators to Washington and a voting member of the House. The District of Columbia sends no senators and a delegate who cannot vote on the House floor. Getting D.C. a voting member of the House has been a losing fight for decades — a bill to do it passed the House in 2007 and the Senate in 2009 and still never became law.

So the bill does not move a boundary. It moves several hundred thousand Americans out of full representation in Congress and into a jurisdiction that has none.

Rep. Don Beyer, the Democrat who represents them, said it plainly to Fox News: Republicans are trying to "permanently deprive hundreds of thousands of my constituents of their right to vote in federal elections."

"Rich McCormick's bill is an embarrassing legislative tantrum," Beyer said. "It is also unconstitutional, and a stupid waste of time. Republicans upset about the passage of Virginia's redistricting referendum should stop whining, as they have no one to blame but themselves."

McCormick's reply, delivered to a reporter at Fox News, was a meme: a Google Map with Beyer's face inside the District's borders, captioned —

"On the bright side, you can run for mayor now, Don Beyer."

He said the quiet part in the same interview

McCormick's public justification is constitutional. The bill's findings section argues the Enclave Clause let Congress accept a ten-mile square from Maryland and Virginia but never gave it the power to give any of it back. "The Make DC Square Act restores the District of Columbia as the Founders envisioned it," he said.

If that were the whole motive, the timing is a remarkable coincidence — the bill landed the day after the referendum, and the 1846 Act had sat there, unrepealed, for 180 years.

But he didn't leave it to inference. In the same round of comments, McCormick argued that "absent the vote of DC bureaucrats," the other 90% of Virginia's geographic voice would remain intact with a "substantial Republican majority." He said the 250,000 votes in Arlington and Alexandria should rightly belong to Washington, D.C.

Read that again. The problem he identifies is the votes. The fix he proposes is to move them somewhere they don't count.

Even Virginia's Republican-friendly critics noticed what this was. A spokesperson for Gov. Abigail Spanberger's office told Fox News that "inflation is skyrocketing, gas is close to $4, and Virginia families are feeling squeezed by high prices," and that "Republicans in Congress should be focused on contending with the high costs and economic chaos created by President Trump."

The history he's invoking is not the flattering kind

McCormick's bill leans on the argument that the 1846 retrocession was illegitimate. It's fair to say the constitutional question has been kicked around for a long time — Presidents Lincoln and Taft both liked the idea of undoing it, and it died in the Senate every time.

But the reason Alexandria left the District in the first place is not a footnote. As WJLA documented, Alexandria had become a major port of the domestic slave trade, with trading companies operating out of a slave pen on Duke Street. Slaveholders and merchants there wanted out of the District because they feared abolitionists would ban the practice inside it — a fear that sharpened in 1844 when Congress stopped refusing to debate anti-slavery petitions. Black residents in the retroceded area soon lost access to schools and gathering places they had been permitted to use.

The 1846 vote itself split hard by geography. ARLnow's history of the episode records that Arlington County voters opposed leaving the District, 106 to 29; the city of Alexandria carried it, 734 to 116.

Nobody living in Arlington today is responsible for any of that. But McCormick is the one who chose to reopen an 1846 fight, and it's worth knowing what the 1846 fight was about.

Local sentiment on his idea in 2026 is not close, either. The president of the Arlington County Civic Federation, Nicholas Giacobbe, described the proposal to ARLnow as "downstaters trying to get rid of us northerners" rather than anything Arlington asked for.

This is a habit in his conference

Congress already governs D.C. like a possession, and the people who do it are usually not from there.

• In September 2025, Tennessee's David Kustoff introduced and marked up a bill in a single day to repeal two laws the D.C. Council had passed — one letting people sentenced as children ask a judge for a second look, one letting old records be sealed.
• Last month, James Comer filed a bill to require an act of Congress before the District can change any tax or fee, after DoorDash objected to a 20-cent delivery charge.

McCormick's contribution is to expand the pool of people who get treated that way by two entire jurisdictions — and to do it because his party lost a referendum.

He has three cosponsors and no path

The Make DC Square Again Act was referred to the Judiciary and Oversight committees on the day it was filed and has not moved since. It has three cosponsors. It is not going to become law, and McCormick almost certainly knows that.

That's the tell. This wasn't legislation. It was a message to a few hundred thousand people who voted the wrong way, and the message was: your vote is the problem, and I'd take it if I could.

Meanwhile, back home, the people who can vote for or against Rich McCormick spent more than a year unable to get in a room with him. After his February 2025 Roswell town hall went viral — hundreds of constituents booing him over DOGE cuts — House Republican leaders urged their members to stop holding in-person town halls, and he took the advice. His next major one wasn't until May 7, 2026, RSVP-only, in a hotel ballroom, with attendees screened and brought in through a back door.

He has a lot to say about who should get to vote. He has much less to say to the people who already can.

We deserve better.

Source

Fox News, Democrat Beyer blasts GOP plan to counter Virginia redistricting by eliminating his seat (April 24, 2026)

Image: A period map showing the District of Columbia and the Virginia territory retroceded in 1846 / Library of Congress, via ARLnow.