The paper noted the hypocrisy of politicians furling themselves in the flag of the United States at Memorial Day celebrations by noting that 3,500 American soldiers have recently died in Iraq  for “freedom” and “democracy,” when over 580,000 citizens who live in the District of Columbia are not represented in their own Congress.  It is time to correct this flaw in the Democratic process. The problem is that Republicans are determined to block it.  Why?
   
For many years now, I have listened to arguments, both for and against, recently repeated in hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the House Bill that balances the vote in the District by giving Utah increased representation as well.  That is why Senator Orrin Hatch is a supporter in the Senate, but he has his work cut out for him in persuading his colleagues to support the bill.  One of his colleagues includes the President of the United States who has threatened to veto it.
   
Republicans in the House, Senate and White House have put up the predictable opposing arguments that the founders never intended for residents of the District of Columbia to vote which they created on December 1, 1800 out of the territories of Maryland and Virginia.  At the hearings, experts said the language of the Constitution states that representation in the Congress is based on the status of a territory as a “State” and the District is not a state.  Others said that in the confusion over where to place the District and how to get it operationalized, the issue simply became lost and it was an item that was overlooked.  The clear fact is that there is no definite wording in the Constitution denying the vote to citizens of the District of Columbia, even though at the time the District was created, there were 10,000 whites and 4,000 Africans, 800 of which were free and 3,200 enslaved. 
           
Like so many other issues where conservatives have cast their weight in favor of a strict constructionist literal version of the Constitution, this method of interpretation is flawed because framers could not possibly have visualized all that was to come afterward.  Just as they could not have envisioned what the computer or the internet would do to modern communications and the availability of information, they could not envision how the District would be populated, reaching just over 800,000 people in the 1950s.  If they had, it is difficult for me to conceive that all of those who give the framers credit for such wisdom would have rejected the prospect of their representation, except for the reasons why they left certain populations out of the Constitution in the first place.
   
In fact, like the original negotiations around the Constitution, so much of the discussion is a proxy for how to deal with race.  As someone who came to live in the District of Columbia just after the 23rd Amendment to the Constitution was passed in (1961) that made it possible for citizens to vote in the Presidential election of 1964, I was a witness to the fact that the biggest impediment to the Home Rule, a vote in Congress or anything else that politically empowered residents was raw racial politics.  By that time, the population of the District had become nearly 70 percent black.    
   
At that time, the Chair of the House District Committee was Rep. John McMillan, Democrat of South Carolina.  He ruled the Committee with an iron fist, staunchly against the interests of black Committee members such as Delegate Walter Fauntroy and Rep. Charles Diggs.  The hearings on such matters were often contentious and on one occasion, a conservative member from Louisiana, Democrat John Rarick, roared that the District could not have home rule because it would soon be governed by the Black Muslims and proposed that the city be given back to Maryland.  Rep. Charles Diggs shot back to Rarick that he was pursuing a “racist line” and he was gaveled to order by McMillan. Fauntroy demanded to know whether McMillan would tolerate his own district being run by Washington – to which he refused to reply.  Such was the nature of the discussion.  It was clear what was at issue.

It is sugar-coated today, but the same issue has prevented the District Delegate in the House Eleanor Holmes Norton, who has waged a valiant opposition to Republicans in the House, from being successful to this point.  One of the key Republican supporters who testified in favor of the DC vote in the House was Jack Kemp, who believes that when George Bush hears the arguments, he will have a revelation and not veto a bill.  But why would Bush be against a bill that gives Democrats in the District and Republicans in Utah equal vote, making the action politically neutral?  I know, I know.  It is unconstitutional. 

Well, sometime soon, I will get a call from yet another reporter asking me, “When will blacks vote for Republicans?”  I will ask them to explain to me the duplicity of a president who can put the lives of thousands of Americans in danger, ostensibly fighting for “democracy” in Iraq, while he vetoed a bill granting the vote to citizens of the District of Columbia.   But this powerful argument too has been un-persuasive.  Well, then it appears to me that on some level, the spirit of John Rarick – who would undoubtedly have been a Republican today had he stayed in the Congress – is still alive.

Dr. Ron Walters is the Distinguished Leadership Scholar, Director of the African American Leadership Institute and professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland College Park.  His latest books are: White Nationalism, Black Interests (Wayne State U. Press); and Freedom Is Not Enough (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers).