WASHINGTON - Legislation to make Washington D.C. the 51st state advanced from the House Committee on Oversight and Reform Wednesday, teeing up the bill's expected passage in the full House for the second consecutive year possibly as soon as next week.

The Democratic-majority committee voted along party lines to pass D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton's Washington, D.C. Admission Act, quashing every Republican amendment during Wednesday's mark-up.

Though largely expected, the vote injects another shot of momentum in Democrats' favor as they seek to seize on their majorities in both chambers of Congress and control of the White House to push D.C. statehood further than it has gone before - transforming the cause from a once-fringe issue to a central part of their voting rights platform.

"Congress can no longer exclude D.C. residents from the democratic process, forcing residents to watch from the sidelines as Congress votes on laws that affect the nation or votes even on the laws of the duly elected D.C. government," Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) said Wednesday morning at the start of a markup session ahead of the vote. "Democracy requires much more."

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., announced last week that the full House would vote on the bill the week of April 19.

Like last year, the bill is likely to face significant hurdles in the Senate. Because of the filibuster, the bill would require support from 60 senators to advance. Democrats hold 50 seats in that chamber, and Vice President Harris, a statehood supporter, can cast tiebreaking votes. But not all Democratic senators have expressed support for the legislation.

Still, advocates have pointed to a record number of co-sponsors in both the Senate and the House as indicators of tremendous progress the statehood cause has made since it first failed in the House nearly 30 years ago. On Wednesday morning, two more senators signed on as co-sponsors, Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., and Sen. John Hickenlooper, D-Colo., bringing the total to 44.

Advocates have framed statehood as both a voting rights and racial justice issue in the plurality-Black city - a message that activists have brought as far as Arizona and Alaska to educate voters.

On Friday, 51 Washington-area clergy leaders from diverse denominations planned to amplify that message with a demonstration in support of statehood to celebrate Emancipation Day - marking the date President Abraham Lincoln freed more than 3,000 slaves in the nation's capital in 1862.

On Wednesday, the Board of Directors of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments unanimously passed its own resolution urging Congress "to establish the state of Washington, D.C. without delay."

"It is time to right this 220-year-old wrong and finally end taxation without representation in Washington, D.C.," said D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, a member of the committee, which includes public officials from the greater Washington metro area who meet to discuss region-wide challenges. "We know that when Washington, D.C. becomes the 51st state, when we get a vote in the House and representation in the Senate, that will make our entire region stronger."

At the Oversight hearing Wednesday, Republicans resorted to two main arguments against statement. One, that it was a Democratic power grab, and another that it was unconstitutional - which Democrats enlisted their resident constitutional law expert, former professor Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., to swat back at the arguments at times in painstakingly technical detail.

Republican Rep. James Comer (Ky.), offered a list of liberal priorities that, he suggested, could become a reality if D.C. becomes a state: "defunding the police, packing the Supreme Court and enacting the Green New Deal."

"Let's be very clear what H.R. 51 is about: It's all about creating two new Democratic Senate seats," he said before name-dropping the nation's top Democrats and referring to a group of liberal members of Congress whom Republicans love to target.

"This bill is part of the progressive pathway that President Biden, Leader Schumer and Speaker Pelosi have to reshape America into a socialist utopia that the squad talks about," Comer said.

During Wednesday's markup, Republicans offered numerous amendments. Rep. Jody Hice, R-Ga., proposed returning D.C.'s right to vote in for members of the House and Senate - if they voted as citizens of Maryland.

The amendment mirrored how voting worked in D.C. between 1790 and 1800, when D.C. residents could vote in federal elections as residents of either Virginia or Maryland, each of which had ceded land to create the capital city.

That system ended in 1801, when Congress stripped D.C. of its voting rights in federal elections and assumed full control of District affairs (residents of the city regained the right to vote for president in the 1960s, with the ratification of the 23rd Amendment). Hice argued that his amendment would resolve the issue of taxation without representation.

"If H.R. 51 is not a power play for two more Democratic senators," Hice said, "then this proposal ought to be a satisfactory solution. If the real issue is allowing District residents to vote, then let's go back the way it was in the founding era, and let them vote as citizens of Maryland."

Norton noted that Hice's amendment didn't seek any agreement from the state of Maryland, or its federal representatives - two of whom were on the committee, Democratic Reps. Jamie Raskin and John Sarbanes. Neither was particularly enthused.

"There is a powerful sense of identity among the residents of the District of Columbia," Sarbanes said. "They built a cultural identity, they built a political identity, they have an allegiance to their community. Why should they have to trade that away in order to secure the right to vote?"

Hice's amendment failed, as had all the other Republican amendments. Some sought more information about how D.C. would transition away from federal assistance in its criminal justice system, which city leaders have yet to fully explain.

Norton's statehood bill provides a transition period in which the District would continue to receive some federal assistance - assistance that other new states have also received. Some failed amendments tried to limit that assistance to 180 days, far shorter than the years of help provided to new states in the past.

The bill would shrink the federal district to a two-mile enclave that includes federal buildings, such as the Capitol, Supreme Court and White House. The rest of the city's residential and commercial areas would become the State of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth, honoring abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

Responding to Republican arguments about a "Democratic power grab," Maloney said: "The real power grab is denying 712,000 taxpaying American citizens the right to vote. This isn't about politics. It's about a fundamental civil and voting rights issue. And it's outrageous in my opinion that Republicans would play partisan politics just to block 712,000 Americans from having full equality in our democracy."

A vote is expected late Wednesday.