 
Dear President-elect Barack Obama:
I’m a resident in the District of Columbia, which means I do not have the right to vote. And that’s a travesty. What could possibly be the rationale behind denying taxpaying Americans representation in the Congress?
The Constitution of the United States proscribes congressional representation in the Congress as being reserved to “the several states” and according to the definition of Article I, Section 2 the District is not what’s regarded as a “state.”
Additionally, that article and section also limits Congress taxation power to “the several states”—and the 16th Amendment gives Congress the power to levy federal income taxes only in “the several states” as well.
By this rationale, all federal income tax obligations should be lifted from the District 600,000 residents as unconstitutional—or am I being too rational? If I am, then the Congress must explain to me and the other half-million District residents why “the several states” is being defined to include those of us living in the federal city for taxation purposes…but we’re not being included when the issue becomes one of voting rights.
Look, simply put, the federal government cannot have it both ways. If the District of Columbia is not a state, its residents should be exempt from federal income tax. If the people residing in the District are not exempt, the constitutional provision regarding “the several states” should be applied consistently—giving me and others living in the federal city full voting membership on Capitol Hill.
The long history of voting rights for Americans living in Washington D.C. has been one of blatant and gross denial. In 1791 President George Washington set boundaries for the District of Columbia, carved from pieces of Maryland and Virginia. By 1800 Congress and the president had moved from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to the District; the following year an act of Congress passed legislation that incorporated D.C. and divided the territory into two counties. But the laws of both Maryland and Virginia continued to remain in force within the District.
Following the passage of this act, American citizens residing in the District of Columbia were no longer considered residents of either Maryland or Virginia. This left D.C. residents unable to vote for the president or members of Congress…for the next 160 years.
Not until 1961 did Congress restored Americans living in Washington D.C. their right to vote for the President of the United States by adopting the Twenty-third Amendment to the Constitution, which didn’t take effect until 1964 (a mere 44 years ago) when District voters cast their first presidential ballots.
It would be another six years before Congress created a non-voting delegate in the House of Representatives—an elected office but, in effect, a political eunuch. And since 1982 the posts of
“shadow House representative” and “shadow Senator” have been referred to as “congressional representatives” or lobbyists petitioning on behalf of residents of the District for statehood and voting rights.
And while they continue to have no vote in the Congress 230 years after the Framers of the Constitution signed off on the document, D.C. residents know democracy in America as egalitarian in its objective yet inert in its execution. By using this language—“the several states”—did the Founding Fathers intend to disenfranchise a sizable segment of the country’s citizenry? By definition, this would exclude the country’s four commonwealths: Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia with no codicil amendment to clarify the voting status of these four “states.” No national convention has ever been called—or at the very least a codicil to the Constitution or an amendment to clarify that the commonwealths of Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia are counted among “the several states”…or is this just something that’s understood?
My point is simple: Is the Constitution of the United States being violated here? Did the “best-laid plan” by the Framers in 1788 go astray of its intent early in the founding of the United States of America? What’s the U.S. Supreme Court’s view on these matters?
Notwithstanding that some of the Founding Fathers sincerely believed not everyone should have the right to vote, what could possibly be the rationale behind continuing to deny taxpaying Americans residing in the nation’s capital a vote in the Congress?
Regardless of historical shortsightedness on the part of the Framers or political indifference currently on Capitol Hill, everyone inside the Beltway knows the major impediment to D.C. voting rights is the Republican Party: If the District were a Republican stronghold, they would be clamoring for D.C. residents to have full representation. The GOP knows, of course, that representatives elected by the citizens of the District would most certainly be Democrats, elected representatives sharing the demographic and political characteristics of the majority population, and thereby potentially tilting the balance of partisan power in the House of Representatives and the Senate. (In 2007 a bill to make a District representative a full voting member with a seat in the Congress came within five Senate votes of passing.)
Those politicians on Capitol Hill opposed to District residents having the right to vote in Congress naturally ignore the fact that Washington D.C. has a larger population than the State of Wyoming, a state which has two senators and one representative. We deserve more than a “shadow” delegation on Capitol Hill. And a single vote in the House of Representatives is disproportionate to the population. District residents rightly deserve two votes in the Senate and one in the House. End of story.
Obviously, a two-party system was unanticipated by the Framers, otherwise this legal right would immediately enjoy much wider agreement. Unfortunately, political desires contradict one’s personal ethos. Effectively, Washington D.C. is the only capital of a major democracy where its residents are disenfranchised.
What could possibly be the rationale behind denying taxpaying Americans representation in the Congress? Disrespect and neglect…another example of our historic American hypocrisy, as old as the bones of Thomas Jefferson and as expected as the rising sun.
Respectfully,
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