Taxation Without Representation, The Long Fight for DC Voting Rights

The license plates on most cars registered in the District of Columbia carry a phrase that doubles as a political argument: taxation without representation. It is not decorative. Washington residents pay federal income taxes. They have no voting representative in Congress. They have no senator. They have one delegate in the House of Representatives who can vote in committee but not on the House floor. They have been in this condition, in one form or another, since the District was created.

The original logic was straightforward, if convenient. The founders argued that the residents of the federal capital should not have disproportionate influence over the national legislature simply because they lived near it. The argument had a certain theoretical elegance and a practical effect that its architects may have noticed: it permanently disenfranchised whatever population happened to live in the capital.

From eighteen hundred until eighteen seventy-four, the District had varying degrees of local governance. Congress abolished the elected government in eighteen seventy-four following a period of heavy debt accumulated under the brief governorship of Alexander Shepherd, who had transformed Washington from a muddy, unpaved city into something resembling a modern capital by spending money the District did not have. Congress replaced elected government with three appointed commissioners.

The Twenty-Third Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in nineteen sixty-one, gave District residents the right to vote for president for the first time. It took one hundred seventy-one years.

The District of Columbia Home Rule Act of nineteen seventy-three restored a limited form of local self-government: an elected mayor and city council, subject to Congressional override of any legislation. Congress has used that override authority multiple times, including to reverse locally passed laws on gun regulations, marijuana policy, and criminal sentencing.

The statehood movement, which would give Washington two senators and full House representation, has been active since at least the nineteen seventies. A statehood bill passed the House twice, in twenty twenty and twenty twenty-one. It did not pass the Senate.