Students laud D.C. voting rights act

After the Senate passed the District of Columbia House Voting Rights Act on Thursday by a 61-37 vote, D.C. residents are one step closer to getting a voting representative in Congress. The House of Representatives will vote on the bill later this week.

The bill, introduced in the Senate by Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), increases the number of seats in the House from 435 to 437. In addition to giving D.C. residents their first-ever voting representative, the bill also adds a seat for Utah — currently the next state in line to gain a representative based on U.S. Census numbers — and eliminates the seat for a nonvoting D.C. House delegate.

Several University students from D.C. said they were glad it may finally gain representation in Congress.

“I’m really happy about it,” Elizabeth Borges ’11 said. “People in D.C. are subject to the same laws as everyone else in the U.S., yet for many, many years, we have not had a voting member in Congress, which I think is very unfortunate and contrary to American ideals.”

Robert Barnett ’09 said that he feels it is “one of the great injustices of our times” that D.C. residents, who fulfill all of the same qualifications of American citizenship as state residents, do not have the right to vote for the politicians who make decisions about their welfare.

Julia Blount ’12 echoed this sentiment in an e-mail, noting that she felt her November ballot was “a very worthless vote.”

“Besides the fact that my presidential vote was irrelevant (95 percent of the city voted for Obama), my vote[s] for our ‘shadow senator’ and for our perennial nonvoting delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton were also useless,” she said. “They didn’t get me anywhere.”

Borges said that when she had the chance to vote in New Jersey, she took it.

Thursday was not the first time the issue of D.C. voting rights has appeared before Congress. Residents of D.C. originally lost congressional representation when Washington became the nation’s capital in 1801, as they were no longer residents of a state. They gained the right to vote in presidential elections when the 23rd Amendment was ratified in 1961, and Congress granted them the nonvoting House seat they currently have in 1970. Congress passed a constitutional amendment to give D.C. a voting representative in 1978, but the amendment expired in 1985 after being ratified by only 16 states.

The debate over D.C. voting rights has been especially contentious because of the partisan politics involved. An earlier version of the District of Columbia House Voting Rights Act was passed by the House in April 2007 by a 241-177 vote. In September of that year, however, voting rights progress came to an abrupt halt in the Senate when a group led by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the Senate minority leader, staged a filibuster. As such, the powers of D.C. delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton remained limited, as by law she can only sit on committees, participate in floor debates and introduce legislation.

Will Wallace ’09 said in an e-mail that many of D.C.’s issues stem from the fact that its residents are not represented by a voting member of Congress. “[T]he effects of not having a voting member of Congress go way beyond mere symbolism,” he explained. “Voting rights is VERY important to D.C. residents because it affects each one of them directly.” He cited the naming of one of Washington’s airports after former president Ronald Reagan, the city’s poor educational system and high crime rates as issues that would have been alleviated by interested legislators.

Even if the House does pass the bill, some students said it would only be the first step toward adequate representation for D.C.

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Borges explained that some proponents of D.C. voting rights worry that if the bill is passed, further attention to the problem of D.C. representation will be virtually nonexistent.

“I think it’s a good incremental step to get a foot in the door,” she said. “I think it’s better than [no representation] at this point.”

Barnett expressed a similar sentiment. “I think certainly it’s only a first step and that even if [the bill] were to pass, it would be unfair and unjust for citizens to have no vote in the Senate,” he said. “That would be the next hurdle which I hope … Congress and the courts could get over.”

Borges noted that “ideally, we would have representation in both houses of Congress,” but she added that she felt this would be very difficult to achieve.

William Sullivan ’11 said the bill is more “symbolic” than anything else, and, as a citizen living in Washington, D.C., he feels he has the right to be represented.

“I think, ultimately, it’s not going to make a difference in legislation,” he said. “I see absolutely no functional role: There’s such a Democratic majority. Right now, I don’t think it matters for the near future, for the next four years.” He explained that though the potential D.C. House seat may not be significant in the short term, he feels D.C. voting rights should be re-evaluated in the future.

“Of all things I would like Congress to be focusing on right now, it’s not D.C. voting rights,” Sullivan added.

But Wallace maintains that D.C. voting rights deserve the attention of legislators. “It is a testament to how seriously D.C. residents treat this campaign that Congress has taken up this issue so early in its session at a time when it is otherwise charged with saving the country from economic ruin,” he said.

The recently passed bill also includes an amendment proposed by Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) to “restore Second Amendment rights to the District of Columbia.” Ensign’s amendment was approved by a 62-36 vote.

D.C. resident Anh D. Nguyen ’11 said in an e-mail that he finds it “outrageous that the Senate would have the audacity to compromise such a fundamental right by creating an additional seat that would go to … Republican Utah and stripping the District of most of its gun control laws.”

“Voting rights should never be subject to compromises and handshakes between political elites,” Nguyen said.

An additional source of worry for the act’s advocates is that the constitutionality of the bill may be challenged in court, several students said, since Washington, D.C., is not a state.

“I am sure that if the bill passed and was signed into law, there would be a Constitutional challenge,” Blount said. “I am not sure what would happen in that case, but it seems against the idea of the Constitution to have so many people disenfranchised.”

Nguyen explained he felt the fact that many residents of the city are American citizens justifies their right to have voting representatives in Congress.

“Republicans might argue that the Constitution stipulates that the House should consist of members chosen ‘by the people of the several states,’ ” Nguyen said. “True, D.C. might not be a state, but the people of D.C. are American citizens, and no citizen should be deprived of the right to vote, regardless of their geographical status.”