“Congress rules over this colony called the District of Columbia,” said Ralph Nader, longtime consumer advocate and many time presidential candidate. “For over two hundred years, [residents of the District of Columbia] haven’t had the right that all other Americans have in the 50 states to elect their own voting representative and two senators.”
“No other capital city in any country that claims to be a democracy disenfranchises, strips its residents of its capital city (like Brasilia or London) of the right to vote for representatives in their Parliaments. Only the District of Columbia remains a colony.” How could it be that in the “21st century [the] District of Columbia still has the rights that a lot of Americans got in the 18th century under our Constitution?” asked Nader. “[Congress can] control its budget, distort its budget, overrule referenda that the voters of the District have passed, and in a variety of ways make the District taxpayers pay for all kinds of federal expenses.”
Washington Post columnist Colby King recently noted, “Congress expressly prohibits the District from taxing the income earned within its borders by nonresidents, a power that all states have; two-thirds of the income earned in the District is earned by nonresidents. The federal government, the city’s largest employer, uses city services but does not pay property, sales or income taxes. Neither do embassies, international institutions or many tax-exempt nonprofits (such as Fannie Mae). Together, they occupy 57 percent of the District’s land.”
Instead of a congressperson with full voting rights, the District of Columbia has a Delegate to the House of Representatives, Eleanor Holmes Norton. For the past four years, Delegate Norton has been allowed to vote in the House’s Committee of the Whole. However, with the recent elections which saw Republicans gain control of the House, Delegate Norton and District residents have been stripped of even this vote in the Committee of the Whole.
President Obama campaigned on voting rights for the District of Columbia and received the support of more than 90 percent of District residents in 2008. Yet, as president, Obama has been silent on the issue. In a Feb. 1 open letter to the president, Nader wrote, “Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reflected your sentiments when she commented on the Egyptian uprising with the words ‘We want to see free and fair elections.’ But in the District of Columbia, where you and Secretary Clinton reside, there are no ‘free and fair elections’ for electing representatives with full voting rights to Congress. There is only the continual disenfranchisement – unique to all other national capital cities in purported democracies – for the hundreds of thousands of voting age citizens in the District of Columbia.
“You stated that the United States ‘will continue to stand up for the rights of the Egyptian people.’ Presumably that includes the right to have members of Parliament, with full voting rights, elected by the Egyptian voters… Come home with your rhetoric, Mr. President, come home to liberate your District of Columbia.”