This is the battle cry of thousands of supporters of the D.C. Voting Rights Act and the motto displayed on the Washington, D.C. license plate. This act is the bipartisan consensus bill sponsored in the House by Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA) and Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC). The bill would grant Washington, D.C. residents one voting member in the House. Currently, D.C. residents do not have official voting representation in the US Congress. They have no representatives in the Senate, but do have a non-voting delegate in the House of Representatives. Residents of Washington, D.C. cannot legally have voting representatives in the Congress because the Constitution only grants this to residents of states.
This is clearly a controversial issue. In my opinion, it is unfair that D.C. residents pay the second highest per capita federal income taxes in the nation but are denied voting representation in Congress. For over 200 years, 600,000 residents of our country have been deprived of their right to determine how they are governed—all because of a technicality. Until 50 years ago, D.C. residents weren’t even allowed to vote in presidential elections.
Thankfully, there is something being done. If enacted, the D.C. Voting Rights Act would obtain the congressional representation for the residents of Washington, D.C. that they should have had all along. But for the Act to become law, Congress would have to pass the bill and soon-to-be President Obama would have to sign it into law. Fortunately, Obama supports D.C. statehood (making Washington, D.C. officially a state) and congressional representation for D.C.
http://www.dcvote.org/
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“6. That elections of members to serve as representatives of the people, in assembly, ought to be free; and that all men, having sufficient evidence of permanent common interest with, and attachment to, the community, have the right of suffrage, and cannot be taxed or deprived of their property for publick uses without their own consent, or that of their representatives so elected, nor bound by any law to which they have not, in like manner, assented, for the publick good.”
From the Virginia Bill of Rights, June 12, 1776
Do we still believe this? Or do we not? Or is it only applicable WEST of the Potomac?
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