Washington
In 1783, a mob of Revolutionary War soldiers, demanding back pay, marched on Philadelphia and laid siege to the Continental Congress.
Fearful members of Congress, knowing full well the considerable martial skills and rebellious zeal of the troops, urged Pennsylvania authorities to call out the state militia.
But the Pennsylvanians sided with the soldiers, and Congress ignominiously fled to New Jersey.
And that is why – you can look it up – the 550,000 citizens of the District of Columbia have no vote in Congress. In 1787, while drafting the Constitution, Congress awarded itself “exclusive” power over the capital, and declined to give its residents a vote.
Now comes Rep. Tom Davis, a Republican from suburban Virginia, with a bipartisan, classically American, pragmatic compromise that would give his neighbors across the Potomac River representation in Congress.
Davis proposes to expand the membership of the House of Representatives from 435 to 437, by adding one representative from the heavily Democratic District of Columbia and one from dependably Republican Utah.
If House Republican leaders will only let his bill reach the House floor, Davis says, it will pass with more than 300 votes. It won the endorsement of the Government Reform Committee he chairs this month by a 29-4 vote.
It is, he says, a simple matter of fairness.
“From the nation’s capital, people have fought and died in 10 wars,” says Davis, a Vietnam era veteran. “You have had more people die from D.C. than from some states in Iraq. In Vietnam, I think, they outdid 10 states in terms of the death toll.
“They pay federal taxes,” says Davis. “Why in the world shouldn’t they be given at least a vote in the House?”
The answer, at least recently, is politics: Republicans have not wanted to give their foes an extra vote.
That is where Utah comes in.
Utah is perhaps the most reliably Republican state in the Union and thinks it got cheated out of a fourth seat in Congress after the 2000 census.
The state sued when it came up 857 people short and lost the 435th seat to North Carolina, but the federal courts failed to buy its contention that the thousands of Mormon missionaries, stationed abroad, should be included in the count.
To craft any sort of bipartisan compromise on Capitol Hill these days takes considerable political talent, and no little amount of faith. Yet Davis has tweaked his measure in all the right ways.
He got Democrats in the House to endorse the bill after winning assurances that Utah Republicans wouldn’t use the opportunity to gerrymander Democratic Rep. Jim Matheson’s district. And he soothed the concerns of many Republicans by obtaining the blessing of conservative legal heavies like former Solicitor General Kenneth Starr, and former Republican Reps. J.C. Watts of Oklahoma and Jack Kemp of New York.
“The denial of representation was one of the provocations that generated the Declaration of Independence and the War that implemented it,” Starr reminded Congress.
Davis is one of the Republican Party’s most accomplished political tacticians and sports an 80 percent rating with the American Conservative Union. But he has met resistance from Republican House leaders, and members of the GOP caucus, who ask: “Why are we worried about D.C. voting rights?”
The House Judiciary Committee is the next square on the legislative game board, and Davis can’t guarantee that a majority of the panel’s Republicans will vote his bill to the floor.
“It would really sadden me if the Republican Party has come to a basic civil rights issue and asks, ‘Are we advantaged or disadvantaged?’ You would like to think members are on a little bit higher ground than that,” says Davis.
But, “you need to get members comfortable. … You have to educate them on it. You have to make them feel good,” he says.
“We aren’t trying to do any ploys,” says Davis. “We have made this as politically neutral as we could.
“Sometimes in politics you don’t just think politics – even in an election year,” he says. “You just do the right thing.”
Read and comment on John Aloysius Farrell’s columns at The Denver Post’s Washington Web log (denverpostbloghouse.com/ washington).
