Taxed Without a Vote: One Hundred and Seventy-One Years Without Self-Government

The District of Columbia license plates read "Taxation Without Representation." It is not a slogan. It is a description of the city's legal status for most of its history.

Congress established the District in eighteen hundred and assumed direct governance of it in eighteen oh one. From that year until nineteen seventy-three, residents of Washington paid federal taxes, were subject to federal law, and from the Civil War onward served and died in federal wars. They could not elect their mayor. They could not elect their city council. They had no voting representation in the legislature that governed them. For one hundred and seventy-two years, the people who lived in the capital of a republic defined by representative government had none.

The Twenty-Third Amendment, ratified in nineteen sixty-one, gave District residents the right to vote for president, which they had not had until then. The District of Columbia Home Rule Act of nineteen seventy-three created an elected mayor and city council. Congress retained the right to override any legislation those elected officials pass and controls the District's budget annually. DC's representative in the House of Representatives votes in committee but not on the full House floor.

The DC statehood movement, which has been active in various forms for decades, argues that this arrangement is constitutionally the same problem the framers invoked in seventeen seventy-six. The Capitol building visible from almost anywhere in the District is the building where the people who live within sight of it have no senator, and one representative who cannot vote on the floor.

The license plate slogan was approved by the DC City Council around the year two thousand. Congress has the authority to require the plates to be changed, which it has occasionally threatened to do.