DC Voting Rights March - April 16, 2007

I have lived in Washington D.C. all of my life. 

And as a lifelong civil rights lobbyist, I have always spoken out on Capitol Hill on behalf of my fellow Americans.  In fact, I probably spend more time on Capitol Hill than anywhere else.

Yet, as a lifelong resident of Washington, D.C., I have never had my own representative to speak out on Capitol Hill on my behalf. 

For over 200 years, more than half a million District of Columbia residents have lacked any voting representation in Congress, even though we pay federal taxes and meet all of the other responsibilities of citizenship.  When Congress votes on matters such as war and peace, taxes and spending, health care, education, and the environment, we are given no role in the process.

I doubt seriously that the authors of our Constitution – who founded the nation, in part, out of disdain for "taxation without representation" – could have possibly intended to impose it all over again by denying the capital's citizens the right to vote.  The District was created to keep any one state from controlling the seat of the federal government, not to create a "no man's land" where the most important civil right we have would simply not apply.

In an attempt to correct this oversight, Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, D. D.C., and Rep. Tom Davis, R. Va., have been working to enact a bill, which passed in the House, that would give District residents a vote in the House, and would give Utah an additional representative until the next census. 

I believe this to be a workable solution, in part, because the bill would also keep either political party from taking advantage of the situation – a problem that has stymied efforts to bring democracy to the capital for far too long.

But some have argued that under the Constitution, Congress cannot treat the District as a "state" in order to grant it the representation it deserves.  They argue that Congress must pass a constitutional amendment.  President Bush has even threatened to veto the bill for just this reason.

However, Congress defines the District as a state in over 500 provisions of the U.S. Code, and treats the District as if it were a state in every way except with respect to political and civil rights and basic power of self-government. 

So it is not a matter of what Congress can do, but what it is willing to do, as Rep. Davis stated in his House floor speech.

Nearly 60 percent of District residents are African American. Given our nation's long history of denying blacks the right to vote, this de facto disenfranchisement of black District residents is especially alarming.  If the statistic applied to whites, it is unlikely we'd see the same resistance. 

On principle, we cannot continue to have this kind of widely acknowledged inequality when there is a remedy like this bill that was crafted to benefit everyone involved.