D.C. Voting Rights Should Happen in 2009
By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Today's Washington Post reports that the push to get the District of Columbia a voting member in the House of Representatives will get a quick start this year. And by my count, it should actually happen this time.
At the moment, D.C. has a nonvoting representative in the House, Eleanor Holmes Norton (perhaps best known to a national audience for her excellent jousts with Stephen Colbert). In a 2007 compromise, D.C. would have gotten a representative as would the very Republican state of Utah (conveniently the state that would have, according to census data, been next in line for another seat). That compromise passed but got filibustered in the Senate—57 senators voted to end the filibuster, 42 voted against ending it and one abstained. In order to break the filibuster, 60 votes were required. And even if the Senate had passed the legislation, George W. Bush would have vetoed it.
This tends to be a partisan issue, with Republicans opposing (on the ostensible grounds that the Constitution does not allow for a voting representative from the District) and Democrats favoring.
To me, it's an issue of basic principles. This country was born in part on the idea that citizens should not be taxed without representation. As a fundamental matter, we shouldn't have U.S. citizens living in the United States and its territories who don't have congressional representation. (Puerto Rico is pretty high on this list, too, by the way.) If the GOP is correct about the constitutionality here, then the Constitution is wrong and should be amended. But because the Republicans have shown no interest in amending the Constitution, the add-a-House-seat-for-D.C.-and-one-for-Utah plan is the next best thing.
So, assuming the plan passes the House again (Norton is hoping for a vote somewhere around February 12, but it may be later in the spring), the critical battle will take place in the Senate. By my count (and by Norton's), seven "no" Republican senators have been replaced by Democrats (one "yes" GOP senator—Norm Coleman of Minnesota—appears unlikely to return, either).
Three Democratic "yes" votes—Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Ken Salazar—will (presumably) be replaced by Democrats.
Two of the new Democratic senators—Mark Udall of Colorado and Tom Udall of New Mexico—voted in favor of the D.C. voting compromise in the House. That gets Democrats to 56 Senate votes; assuming four of the other eight new Democratic senators vote like, well, Democrats, D.C. should get its vote this year. Finally.
- Read more by Robert Schlesinger.
- Read more from the Thomas Jefferson Street blog.
- Read more about Washington, D.C.
- Read more about voting.
Tags: House of Representatives | Washington, DC
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Addressed to JM of WI
Meanwhile, the D.C. Republican Committee hand-delivered a letter to Republican senators urging them to support the bill.
"More than half a million U.S. citizens who live in Washington, D.C., pay federal income taxes at a higher per capita rate than all but one state, yet we have no vote on raising or spending federal revenue," the letter reads. "
- The Associated Press
How is this blood sucking? Do some research before you write random stuff please, it makes you and your argument sound very unintelligent.
J.M. of WI, do you live here? NO.
Not everyone who lives in the district is "a blood sucking drain on our nation". Most of us are regular citizens, not connected with the blood sucking part, who live and work around the area. We pay federal taxes, local taxes, serve in the military, work for the military, yet we have NO REPRESENTATION. How you can feel this is "constitutional" (as you so aptly put, we should get back to the constitution) to your fellow AMERICAN citizens, I have no idea. All of you republicans who are arguing that giving the district voting rights will go directly against the constitution should read a little deeper. "Taxation without representation" is on our license plates, for christ's sake. If that's not unconstitutional, I don't know what is. If we don't get voting rights in this plan, then we shouldn't pay federal taxes. How does that sound to you J.M. of WI? Put yourself in someone else's shoes before you go spouting your backwards, midwestern, holier-than-thou views.
Consent of the Governed
Voting rights are the means of granting or witholding consent to how we are governed. They are inalienable rights. We ordinary US citizens, heirs also and posterity of the Founders, who happens to be DC denizens HAVE the same inalienable (innate, inherent, intrinsic) right to vote as do residents of the fifty states. The problem is getting our fellow Americans in the fifty states to recognize and respect that fact. If they recognized and respected that fact, we could once again participate in decisions about how the nation in which we live is governed.
Fundamental first principles are the bedrock upon which the Constitution is based. If certain specific provisions of the Constitution are in violation of such fundamental first principles, then the basic principles must eventually prevail, not the specific provisions. The Founders recommended that we make "frequent recurrence to fundamental principles" to guide our decisions. For example:
"6. That elections of members to serve as representatives of the people, in assembly, ought to be free; and that all men, having sufficient evidence of permanent common interest with, and attachment to, the community, have the right of suffrage, and cannot be taxed or deprived of their property for publick uses without their own consent, or that of their representatives so elected, nor bound by any law to which they have not, in like manner, assented, for the publick good."
Virginia Bill of Rights, June, 1776
Do we still believe this, or do we not?
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