Taxation with or without Representation

It may be unusual for someone in Minnesota to care about giving people who live within the bounds of Washington, D.C. a voting seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. But aside from the obvious injustice of it, I experienced it first-hand when I lived and worked in Washington in my mid-20s.


Washington -- which was originally established without regard to the fact that human beings would actually live in it (aside from the residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue) -- had absolutely no extra-local voting rights until the 23rd Amendment was enacted in 1961, giving the District three seats in the Electoral College. That's the same number of seats as is held by a number of states with small populations, and it's the equivalent of how many members of Congress those states have -- two Senators and one Representative.

In case you didn't already know this, D.C. has 600,000 residents, more than the populations of four states (Alaska, North Dakota, Wyoming and Vermont). It lost more soldiers in Vietnam than at least five states, as I recall learning when I lived there, but can't find the list of states now. And those soldiers (or their parents) had no right to vote for a member of the legislative body that sent them to war with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

In case you haven't heard about what's going on recently with this topic (see the New York Times for the story), Congress is probably going to pass a bill that gives D.C. a voting seat, and that also adds a single seat to the state with the most population growth (currently Utah -- which has the added political benefit of balancing extremely Democratic D.C. with extremely Republican Utah, making the deal palatable to those who have long blocked D.C. statehood).

This deal is a bit funky, I have to admit. Basically, they're inflating the set number of representatives by two, which I gather is within their purview. What may not be constitutionally allowed (and court challenges will examine this) is whether Congress can allocate a voting seat to an entity that is not a state.

But this may be the best way to get to the real goal, which is statehood for D.C. If the people of D.C. are given voting rights, and then have them taken away because of court action, it might actually wake up the rest of the country to the fact that this injustice has been occurring all along, and we could finally pass a constitutional amendment making D.C. a state. (And why not Puerto Rico, too?)