Puerto Rico’s status is politically controversial – any bill would suffer massive backlash in Congress.

The Puerto Rico Status Act introduced last week in the House of Representatives is the latest in a long line of efforts to address the legislation’s namesake issue. It would allow Puerto Ricans to choose between statehood, independence, and free association; for the first time ever, that vote would exclude the status quo and bind Congress to the result. Therefore, it’s the most serious attempt in decades to decolonize the largest and longest-held U.S. possession.

It’s also a politically stillborn effort that has no chance of becoming law.

The bill may pass the House, but it will surely die in the Senate, where vociferous and near-unanimous Republican opposition to the mere possibility of Puerto Rican statehood makes it a nonstarter. On the other side of the aisle, support for statehood is far from unanimous, and Senate Democrats who have been unwilling to eliminate the filibuster for their legislative priorities surely won’t do so for an issue that’s not even on their radar.

When the bill fails, whatever little attention the issue is likely to garner over the next few weeks will fade, until the next well-meaning effort runs into the same brick wall of political reality. And Puerto Rico will remain what it has been for 124 years: a U.S. colony.

In recent months, congressional leaders rightfully denounced this as an unacceptable state of affairs.

“Let me tell you what this bill is about,” said Maryland Representative Steny Hoyer when he first unveiled a draft of the Puerto Rico Status Act in May. “Does the United States want to be a colonial power? I hope the answer to that is ‘no.’ Emphatic no. That is not a political issue. That is a principle issue. That’s an issue of what our country is about.”

If he meant it, and if we know the current attempt is doomed to fail, we should waste little time on this legislation and instead look past it to consider what a politically viable decolonization process would look like.

There are two main barriers to addressing the issue of Puerto Rico’s status. The first is that Puerto Ricans remain starkly divided, which has prevented the sort of consensus that might seem to Congress like an unignorable mandate. The 2020 Puerto Rican status referendum, which simply asked “Yes” or “No” on statehood, makes it hard to judge support for other options. But a safe estimate, based on recent polling data, would put roughly half of voters in favor of statehood and the rest split between wanting some form of sovereignty and supporting the status quo.

This is not a matter of Puerto Ricans being indecisive. It’s a thorny decision dealing with complicated questions of national identity and economic sustainability. And the United States has done Puerto Ricans no favors by refusing to be forthright about what’s acceptable and realistic in Washington, D.C.

To its credit, the Puerto Rico Status Act discards the status quo as an option. That’s the right thing to do: No amount of popular support can legitimize a colonial relationship that leaves Puerto Ricans without basic political rights. There should be no such thing as colonialism by consent.

But the only way to truly do away with the status quo is to give it an expiration date. The U.S. must commit to a status change for Puerto Rico, one way or another, in the next decade. That would give the dwindling pro-“commonwealth” holdouts a deadline to line up behind a legitimate option and potentially create a decisive majority for statehood or sovereignty.

Proponents of statehood will say that this is all unnecessary: that Puerto Ricans have already made their choice. In referendums in 2020, 2017, and 2012, Puerto Ricans voted for statehood each time. But the earlier votes were marred by organized boycotts leading to blank ballots and low turnout, while the 2020 referendum produced only the slimmest 52 percent majority for statehood. Many Puerto Ricans have simply not viewed these referendums as legitimate, since Congress has refused to make them binding and failed to act on the results.

Statehood proponents also overlook the second and largest impediment, which has doomed their efforts for decades and will doom this one: widespread opposition in Congress.

That resistance ranges from some legislators’ racist rejection of a Spanish-speaking, all-Latino state, to the partisan concern, unacceptable to Republicans, that Puerto Rico would elect Democratic senators and tip the balance of power in Congress. Some—perhaps most—opposition takes the form of disinterest in the issue altogether, but the end result is the same: an unwillingness to explicitly support statehood or expend political capital to see it through.