Danielle Burs and Walter Smith: Let’s move toward voting representation for DC with a self-help approach

Across the country, millions of people are closely following and will be participating in the upcoming November midterm elections. Every seat in the House is up for election, as are one-third of the seats in the Senate. These elections will allow Americans to have a say in the laws that govern them, the taxes they pay, how those taxes will be spent, whether the country should be fighting in wars, which people should be confirmed as federal judges, and whether citizens approve of how their elected representatives are running the country.

None of those opportunities applies to people living in DC. In 1801, when Congress first established the District of Columbia out of parts of Maryland and Virginia, the people who lived there lost the right to vote in those states. Washingtonians have now been denied voting representation in Congress for 217 years. As a result, DC citizens have no vote on any of the important national matters that Congress decides. Worse, Congress uses its authority to review and overturn local laws and policies made by our locally elected mayor and council, something it does nowhere else in the United States. Ironically, when Congress votes on local DC matters, everyone else in the United States has voting representation on the action taken — just not the people most affected, the people living in the District of Columbia.

This is not what the framers of our Constitution intended. They certainly would not have wanted the great new democracy they created to deny the exercise of its fundamental principles to those living in the capital of that democracy. Yet that is where we are today — in spite of lawsuits, proposed congressional legislation, and proposed constitutional amendments designed to fix this unjust anomaly.

There is a way forward on this issue that should be tried now. The District should use the authority Congress gave it in the District of Columbia Home Rule Act to pass local laws that advance democracy — either through ballot initiatives or though DC Council legislation. DC has the ability to amend congressional enactments that solely concern the District under the Home Rule Act. Congress long ago passed a law giving the District a nonvoting delegate to the House of Representatives, and the District can amend that law to change that nonvoting delegate into a voting delegate on all issues applying just to the District. Unless both houses of Congress overturn such an amendment within 30 legislative days and the president signs the disapproval, the amendment will become binding law.

The DC Council and a group of advocates are using this strategy to begin moving a change to the Delegate Amendment Act that would give DC voting representation in the House. In July 2017, Ward 3 DC Council member Mary Cheh introduced the Delegate Voting Rights Amendment Act (Bill 22-0394) with the support of nine other members. And in June 2018, lead organizer DC Appleseed received approval from the DC Board of Elections to circulate petitions to get such legislation on the ballot for voters to enact. The quickest way forward would be for the council to hold a hearing on this bill in the fall and act on it soon after. If the council doesn’t move forward on the legislation, DC Appleseed and others will do so with the initiative. The soonest that the initiative could appear on a ballot would be the next citywide election after this November — likely 2019 or 2020 — so a petition drive would begin closer to that date.

Voting representation in the House just on DC issues is not equivalent to the statehood and full voting representation in both the House and Senate that the District deserves. But it is something we can press forward now as a step toward those ultimate goals. Passing the Delegate Voting Rights Amendment Act will not only give District residents greater voting representation; it will also help make the District’s lack of full enfranchisement visible to people across the country who are ready to stand up for voting rights.

Similar efforts to advance DC democracy by passing local laws have already worked twice: when voters passed a referendum that changed DC’s attorney general from an appointed position to an elected official, and when they passed a referendum that established autonomy for the District over its own local budget. In neither instance did Congress overturn the locally passed legislation, and in both cases the measures became law. For several reasons, now is the time to use this strategy to gain DC residents a vote in the House of Representatives.

First, if the proposed legislation is passed this fall, it is possible that our newly empowered voting delegate could be seated early next year along with members from the rest of the country. Second, bringing visibility to the District’s lack of voting representation when the November midterm elections are approaching will help put the issue of full democracy for the District on the agenda of the new Congress. Finally, we should pass this legislation because it is a tool within local control that can advance DC democracy. If we don’t use every tool we have to advance that cause, we are unlikely ever to fully achieve it.

If you’d like to join DC Appleseed in our efforts to expand DC voting rights, please email Danielle Burs at dburs@dcappleseed.org. To learn more about the issue, check out our Voting Rights project page.

Danielle Burs is counsel to and Walter Smith is executive director of DC Appleseed, a nonprofit group that seeks to develop solutions to some of the District’s toughest problems and to push for their implementation.