There is nothing in our Constitution’s history or its fundamental principles suggesting that the Framers intended to deny the precious right to vote to those who live in the capital of the great democracy they founded.
– Kenneth Starr and Patricia Wald, 9/15/2006
The District of Columbia has no representation in the United States Congress save for a solitary non-voting delegate to the House of Representatives, despite being home to 581,530 tax-paying American citizens, the majority of which are African American. A recent bill which passed the house would have granted the District of Columbia its first ever vote in the House of Representatives. This bill did not make it to the Senate Floor, despite some bi-partisan support, due to disagreements between government officials regarding the constitutional issues surrounding the District of Columbia and its relationship to Congress. Although the City of Washington has had a mayor and city council since 1973, the United States constitution gives Congress supreme authority over the city and District of Columbia. Congress not only reviews and can modify D.C.’s local budget, but it can also annul any municipal law it does not agree with, despite not having any member of its body directly elected by the people of D.C.
Last week, the United States Senate fell three votes short of opening debate on S. 1257, the District of Columbia House Voting Rights Act of 2007. The bill, which passed the House of Representatives this past April as H.R. 1433, would have provided the citizens of the District of Columbia a voting representative in the House and would also have given a fourth representative to Utah, a Republican stronghold that is next in line to see its number of representatives increased.
Whereas at one point the District of Columbia had a larger population than many states, the population of the District of Columbia currently falls roughly between that of Wyoming and Vermont, the nation’s two least-populated states. If it were a state, it would be allotted 1 House Representative and 2 Senators, as well as its 3 votes in the electoral college that it received after the ratification of the 23rd amendment in 1963. Its population is overwhelmingly in support of Democratic Party. For instance, in the 2004 presidential election, almost 92% of the voting population in the District of Columbia cast their vote for the Kerry/Edwards ticket. Their non-voting delegate to the House of Representatives has consistently been a member of the Democratic Party since the position was revived in 1971.
Opposition to granting federal representation to the District of Columbia by way of the District of Columbia House Voting Rights Act of 2007 was primarily voiced by Republicans and driven by the belief that doing so would be unconstitutional:
“My opposition to this bill rests … on a single all-important fact. It is clearly and unambiguously unconstitutional. The framers spelled it out explicitly in the original text.”
- Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) 9/17/2007
Senator McConnell is referring to Article I, Section 2 and Article I, Section 3 of the United States constitution, which state that the federal legislature is to be composed of
representatives of “the several states” without mention of representation for nonstate federal entities such as colonies, territories or federal districts.
There are precedents, however, for treating Washington D.C. as a state for federal purposes. According to Jamin Raskin, American University Professor of Law, the federal government defines D.C. as a state for legal purposes in over 500 statutes. The most oft-cited of these is that the citizens of the District of Columbia pay their full federal income tax as if they were citizens a state, despite the explicit wording of the sixteenth amendment:
“The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states…”
In its most recent Statement of Administration Policy, the Bush White House was clear in its opposition to the bill:
“The Constitution limits representation in the House to Representatives of States… The District of Columbia is not a State. Accordingly, congressional representation for the District of Columbia would require a constitutional amendment… [E]nacting S. 1257’s extension of congressional representation to the District would be unconstitutional. It would also call into question (by subjecting to constitutional challenge in the courts) the validity of all legislation passed by the reconstituted House of Representatives… Accordingly, if S. 1257 were presented to the President, his senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill.”
In an article last year for the Washington Post, Kenneth Starr and Patricia M. Wald voice their concern with the interpretation of the constitution shared by Bush and McConnell:
“It is not a surprise that our Constitution, ratified in 1789, contemplated that the right to vote would be enjoyed only by ‘the people of the several states.’ After all, in 1789, all U.S. citizens lived in a state. It was not until 1801, when the process Congress authorized by statute in 1791 to create the District out of lands ceded by Virginia and Maryland was completed, that District residents lost their federal voting rights. There is no reason to believe the Framers intended for this to happen”
The constitution itself gives Congress broad and virtually limitless power over the affairs of the District of Columbia — a power which supporters of the D.C. voting rights movement believe authorizes Congress to grant it a voting member of the House. Of this, Starr and Wald wrote:
It is hard to imagine a broader, more comprehensive congressional power than this; and it is also hard to imagine that the power could not be used to advance a fundamental principle of our Constitution — that the right to vote should be extended to all citizens.
The recent bill’s detractors disagree that the constitution gives Congress the power to grant the District of Columbia its vote in the House. In the aforementioned Statement of Administration Policy, the Bush White House claims:
Congress’s exercise of legislative authority over the District of Columbia is qualified by other provisions of the Constitution, including the Article I requirement that representation in the House of Representatives is limited to the “several States.” Congress cannot vary that constitutional requirement under the guise of the “exclusive legislation” clause, a clause that provides the same legislative authority over Federal enclaves like military bases as it does over the District.
This isn’t the first time that a similar bill has been introduced in congress. In fact, in 1978 the Senate passed a constitutional amendment that would have given full statehood rights to the District of Columbia. It failed to be ratified by the requisite two-thirds of the states and died in 1985. Since then, a number of bills have been proposed that would give voting rights to the citizens of the District of Columbia, including and last year’s District of Columbia Fair and Equal House Voting Rights Act of 2006.
Although the Democratic Party stands the most to gain if heavily Democratic Washington, D.C. gained a vote in the House of Representatives, the most recent bill was co-sponsored by senator Thomas M. Davis (R-VA). Several prominent Republicans — incluing predsidential candidate Mike Huckabee, ultra-conservative Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Former congressman Jack Kemp, and former federal prosecutor Kenneth Starr — voiced their support for the the District of Columbia House Voting Rights Act of 2007. Says Huckabee:
“They’re American citizens. They pay taxes and it just doesn’t seem right that someone could be even partially disenfranchised.
Senator Hatch, whose own state, Utah, stood to gain an extra representative from the passing of the bill, put it quite plainly:
“There are 600,000 people in the District of Columbia never contemplated by the founders of this country to be without the right to vote.”
In fact, throughout history, the cause of D.C. voting rights has been championed by some of the most prototypical Republicans, including Richard Nixon, Bob Dole, and Dwight Eisenhower. According to a 2005 op-ed in the Washington Post, president Eisenhower was an unwaivering supporter of giving voting rights to D.C.’s citizens:
Eisenhower recommended such action in eight messages to Congress. In one State of the Union address, he called the lack of D.C. voting representation in Congress ‘unconscionable.’
The official Republican party platform of 1976 stated:
“We…support giving the District of Columbia voting representation in the United States Senate and House of Representatives.”
So, with a history of bipartisan support and deep implications that strike at the very foundation of what it means to be a liberal, open democracy, why is this not one of the most pressing concerns of our Nation and its current congress? Why don’t the Republicans support D.C. voting rights in their current official party platform? Why have bills and constitutional amendments been proposed in and passed through congress only to die before they become law?
For more information, please visit D.C. Vote or the homepage for D.C. congressional delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton.
