Senate Denies D.C. Voting Rights

Sept. 17, 2007 — -- A slogan from the Revolutionary War is alive and well in the nation's capital.

The license plates here in Washington read: "Taxation Without Representation."

Today's Senate vote that would have given DC residents their first ever member of Congress did nothing to change it. At 2:52 this afternoon, Senators failed to reach the 60 votes needed to proceed to a vote on the DC voting rights bill. It failed 57-42.

Washington residents do in fact pay taxes, but they don't have anyone in Congress deciding what the federal government does with their money.

Even as the U.S. government wages war in the Middle East to spread democracy, Washingtonians today -- 222 years to the day after the Constitution was ratified -- are not represented in Congress.

It is a long-standing and bitter irony for residents here: The people who make all the laws might live and work in Washington, D.C., but the people who live in Washington, D.C. don't get to pick who makes the laws.

They did not get to vote for president until 1961 when the 23rd Amendment was ratified.

It is an irony not lost on lawmakers from small states.

"The District of Columbia has roughly the same number of people as Vermont," said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., on the Senate floor Monday. "And we have had the right to vote for 200 years."

At this point, it's as much a partisan issue as anything else.

The District of Columbia is overwhelmingly populated with registered Democrats, and their elected representative would almost certainly be Democrats. It is in Republicans' best interests to block any plan to give D.C. residents a vote in Congress.

Nevertheless, there plan that had been floating through Congress would have given Washingtonians a seat in the House of Representatives provided the move is offset with the addition of an extra seat in reliably Republican Utah.

Even if the bill had passed, President Bush has threatened to veto it.

Bill supporters are accusing those insisting on a procedural -- or cloture -- vote of unfairly blocking the legislation. And they characterize the D.C. voting bill as a civil rights bill, since Washington's population is majority African-American.