So many missteps for the 109th Congress, and so little space to print them all! But near the top of the list is the inexcusable failure to pass the D.C. Voting Rights Act to give the nation’s capital a voting member of Congress.
You don’t need a Ph.D. in American history to know that “no taxation without representation” was a war cry of the Revolution.
Currently, the District of Columbia is represented by non-voting House delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat who can vote in committee but not on final passage of bills. One champion of the act was Rep. Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican. Yet Congress dropped the ball even though the act would give heavily Republican Utah, with three seats in the House, another member, raising the House total to 437 without changing the partisan balance.
It’s an embarrassment that among the capital cities of Western democracies, only Washington, D.C., with 550,000 residents, has no voting parliamentary representative, even as the United States claims to be spreading democracy in the Mideast. Our neighbors in Wyoming, with 509,000 people, have one voting House member. Washingtonians deserve at least that much.
The District of Columbia was created in 1790 on 100 square miles donated by Maryland and Virginia so that no state could bask in the glory of having the national capital. Pierre Charles L’Enfant designed the city with its radial avenues, traffic circles and vistas for future landmarks and monuments. The city was only one part of the district, which originally included Alexandria County, Georgetown, and Washington County. But in 1847, the 32 square miles donated by Virginia was retroceded to that state. The district is now coterminous with the city of Washington.
Always under the thumb of Congress, the district slowly achieved self-governance, but it was not until 1961 that Washingtonians won the right to vote in presidential elections.
There are some who advocate “retrocession,” or giving the district back to Maryland, but we would oppose that as a bad idea that would create more problems than it would solve (taxation, education and law- enforcement authority among them). Ditto for recasting the district as the 51st state.
House Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi should make full-fledged congressional representation for the District of Columbia a top priority. It’s long overdue.
