Monday, November 23, 2009

Opinion

Robert Schlesinger

D.C. Voting Rights Should Happen in 2009

January 06, 2009 02:00 PM ET | Robert Schlesinger | Permanent Link | Print

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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?

Wow

The constitution says States and now some want the District to have rights of representation. No! The District of Columbia is nothing more than a blood sucking drain on our nation. It serves no purpose but to harbor the assembly of the states. How the territories ever got rights was another unconstitutional act. Ron Paul is right when he advocates getting back to the Constitution!

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Robert Schlesinger is a deputy editor at U.S. News and World Report and oversees all opinion editorial content. He is the author of White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters.

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