Please help DC retain a tiny shred of dignity

[luvspeas]

Source: DC Votes

Date: Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Location: 202.225.6205

On January 5, in the first hours of the 112th Congress, Republican leaders in the House of Representatives will likely silence the DC Delegate's voice in the Committee of the Whole House.


Call the incoming Speaker of the House, Representative John Boehner (R-OH) TODAY at 202.225.6205 and ask him to retain this important piece of DC's participation in the House.


Sample Call Script:

My name is ______ and I'm calling to ask Congressman Boehner to retain the DC Delegate vote in the Committee of the Whole.

DC residents pay full federal taxes, fight in wars and serve on juries, but have no voting representative.

It's taxation without representation. The Committee of the Whole is the only voice DC has when all the members of the House meet.

Please tell Congressman Boehner to retain the DC Delegate vote.

Once you've called, please ask friends and family (especially in Ohio) to call also.

Read more: http://www.dcvote.org/events/event.cfm?eventID=560

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On day one of the new Congress, Wednesday January 5 2011, Republican leaders will likely strip DC of its voice in the Committee of the Whole House, as they did when they last look control in 1995. Revoking even this small piece of full democracy takes a step backward, adding insult to the old injury of DC's second-class status.

[chimpymustgo]

1. Another opportunity missed, when we had the House, the Senate and the Presidency.

[luvspeas]

2. No, they tried to take away our gun laws then...

Posted at 3:00 PM ET, 04/27/2010
U.S. Sens. want to repeal D.C. gun laws
By Washington Post editors


Two U.S. senators plan to introduce legislation Tuesday that would repeal most of the District’s gun laws and restrict the D.C. Council from regulating firearms.

The bill comes one week after District officials dropped efforts to secure a voting member in the House because of similar pro-gun language attached to the voting rights legislation.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), the bill’s sponsors, say the measure is intended to ensure that the District has complied with a landmark 2008 Supreme Court decision.

But Joshua Horwitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop the Violence, said the legislation fails to recognize that the D.C. Council passed new laws last year to comply with the decision, which have been upheld by a federal judge. The city has already repealed the ban on semiautomatic weapons and allows residents to keep loaded guns in their homes.

-- Ann E. Marimow

[Recursion]

4. Well, the city has been pretty much flouting Heller

From a home rule perspective, it irks me to see Congress meddle; on the other hand, DC's gun control regime has been an absolute disaster (notice any particular lack of guns, over the past few decades?) and if this is what it takes to get the city government over its blind spot on this issue, then so be it.

[primavera]

8. You're right, it's been tough to enforce

When you can hop on the metro and within five minutes be in Virginia, where they practically dispense guns from 24 hour ATMs to any idiot or psycho, there's no viable way to prevent people from breaking the law and bringing guns into the District. But what are you going to do? Say that, because your neighbors choose to be reckless and irresponsible, you should follow suit? By that reasoning, we may as well all vote Repuke, since that's what our red state neighbors are doing...

[ProgressiveProfessor]

10. DC is being irresponsible by not allowing legal handguns, not VIrginia

[Recursion]

12. Well, I won't get into gun control on this thread

I'll just say that while I do support the intent of McCain's bill in general, I do ultimately oppose its coming down through Congress. Home rule includes the right to make laws I disagree very strongly with, and the proper remedy if those laws infringe on civil rights is the courts (as Heller showed).

[primavera]

13. I agree

I too have no enthusiasm for rehashing the endless debate over guns; truly that is a dead end street if ever there was one. My only point is that one cannot draw inferences about the success of a law when the area in which the law is being practiced is surrounded by states whose diametrically opposed laws actively undermine the purpose of the law being attempted. It's not easy to recover from alcoholism even under the most ideal of circumstances; it's even tougher when you're in a room full of drunks trying to force drinks down your throat. That doesn't mean the effort to rehabilitate wasn't a worthwhile one.

[benEzra]

14. A state will often be overruled by both the courts and Congress

if state law or regulation infringes on a constitutionally protected right. That happens all the time with state-level abortion restrictions (there are Congressional laws protecting clinics in addition to the court decisions), Federal statutes protecting speech/press, etc. Much of the history of the civil rights movement involved not only the courts, but Congress (e.g., the Civil Rights Act) overruling unconstitutional/illegal state laws aimed at harassing people of color. Even in the realm of gun laws, the 1986 McClure-Volkmer Firearms Owner Protection Act restricted states from banning the lawful transport of firearms through the state, to take just one example of Congress overruling state gun law.

A state has no more power to infringe on constitutionally-protected rights than D.C. does, and vice versa. *NO* state had laws resembling D.C.'s de facto ban on all handguns and most rifles, so it is really not a fair comparison, IMO.

[Recursion]

15. States don't have to beg Congress for home rule

And don't have to have their budgets approved by Congress; most of my opposition is historical, given what Congress has done to and with DC in the past.

[benEzra]

16. Quite so. Just pointing out that states get overruled by Congress

on civil liberties issues (including gun laws) quite regularly, so D.C.'s government being taken up short over their post-Heller shenanigans is not necessarily related to home rule/statehood issues.

[notesdev]

3. There's a reason DC doesn't have a voice in the legislature

Technically, the entire district is part of the government itself. Nobody was ever meant to actually live in the federal district; there's a reason why Maryland and Virginia offered the least hospitable tract of swampland available to create it.

To give DC independent representation will spark a Constitutional crisis, as representation is a privilege of States only in our system. The federal government was designed to be answerable to the States; a DC representative reverses that paradigm.

Living near DC I always found the "taxation without representation" license plates to be supremely ironic. That's what DC does to the rest of us all the time!

If you live in DC and you want representation... move out. Virginia is a lovely state. No comment on Maryland ;)

[Recursion]

5. DC had a voting Representative until 1810 or 1812

I forget which. The people who actually wrote the Constitution seemed not to have a problem with it. I'm more inclined to buy the argument that DC shouldn't have Senators, since the Senate does represent the states.

[jeff47]

6. You'd have a point, except that DC can easily qualify as the 51st state. (nt)

[primavera]

7. Regardless of what the original intent was...

... the fact remains that the vast majority of DC is residential, resulting in the political disenfranchisement of more than half a million ordinary American citizens. I understand your point about the state problem. Personally, I think government should be answerable to the citizens of the United States, which includes citizens who live in US territories and possessions that are not states. But for simplicity's sake, I would go along with an alternative that has been raised from time to time of scaling back the District to that portion of the city that is the home of the federal government and allowing the rest to be ceded back to Maryland and Virginia. Simply writing off the rights of citizens, however, is not an acceptable solution, imho.

[hootinholler]

9. Considering that the Va bit of DC went back to Va after the Civil war,

I don't understand why DC is not a representative district of Md. The population should be counted as Md and districts established. DC residents should also vote for Md Senators also.

:shrug:

-Hoot

[Recursion]

11. Before. Compromise of 1820, IIRC

Until 1810 the District (which included what are now Alexandria, VA and Arlington, VA) had full representatives in the House. After 1810 they didn't for reasons nobody is entirely clear on. One result of that is that the Virginians wanted to go back to Virginia, which ended up happening. The parts of the city north of the Potomac were divided into the city proper (basically everything today south of Florida Ave, east of Rock Creek, and west of say 8th St NE), Georgetown, and "Washington County" which was the rest and only inhabited by a few farmers; the "suburbs" (that ironically became the inner city) weren't settled until around the Civil War.

The point of that rambling lecture was that it wasn't really envisioned that lots of people would live in the parts of the city that didn't have representation (and, at that early time, the President himself was considered the Federal advocate for the people who did live there, and residents could and did walk up to the white house and lobby him).

This is an interesting political matter today because it's one thing that pretty much everybody agrees is a problem, but people disagree on what to do about it. Here are some suggestions I've heard (I was registered DC Statehood before they merged with the Green party):

1. Full statehood
2. Recession for voting (and apportionment) purposes into Maryland
3. Repeal of all Federal taxation and liability for Federal service to DC residents
4. A Constitutional grant of some form of legislative representation that does not actually grant DC statehood
5. A statutory grant of some form of legislative representation

It's generally agreed that statehood cannot be granted statutorily in the manner of territories and possessions, since DC's non-state status is established in the Constitution.

The question of whether a statutory grant of suffrage would be Constitutional, and it leaves DC residents worried about the fact that it could also be statutorily repealed at a future date (as seems to have happened in 1810).

A Constitutional grant of either statehood or Congressional suffrage would be pretty much legally incontestable, but it would take getting 38 states to dilute their power in the Senate (assuming full representation was applied for). A House vote seems more doable since adding one Democrat is probably neither here nor there (and the recent statutory attempts have all been "paid for" with the grant of an additional seat to a conservative state).

Option 3 is amusing, at least: turn DC into the Monaco of the East coast. Not even the GOP seems to take this idea very seriously.

Recession is one I keep coming back to: a statute to the effect that for apportionment and voting purposes, residents of DC are to be considered residents of Maryland. Maryland would have to agree, which is iffy at best.