Today, April 16, is Emancipation Day in the District of Columbia. A commemoration of Abraham Lincoln's abolishment of slavery in DC in 1862, Emancipation Day 2007 has an entirely new target - voting rights for District citizens.
Rob Getzschman has an excellent op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor on the injustice that DC citizens suffer to this day:
The Constitution states that Congress shall "exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever" over the district. Yet its citizens aren't allowed a representative or senator to participate in the lawmaking process. That's 580,000 US citizens who are taxed without representation, taken to war without representation, and subject to laws they have no say in devising. Even the city's budget is subject to congressional approval, leaving local officials at the mercy of a body they don't elect.
Getzschman lays out his argument excellent - serously, go read the entire article. There are a number of points in it that are impossible to argue with. For example:
If spreading democracy is the imperative of the last remaining superpower, then the mandate for the US is to honor D.C. voting rights. To tolerate the status quo smacks of hypocrisy to foreign governments. As a senior Hong Kong official told Rep. Tom Davis (R) of Virginia in 2005, "Give your nation's capital the right to vote and then come talk to us about democracy in Hong Kong."
Sadly, partisan maneuvering belies the political nature of the D.C. voting rights issue. Yeas and nays fall along party lines due to the district's Democratic majority, and opponents see the enfranchisement of 580,000 US citizens as a "power grab" for the Democrats. The issue, however, is emphatically nonpartisan. Voting rights are rooted in the Constitution, not the partisan makeup of a region.
I'll steal one more line from him, the choice words he closes with - and that are being echoed by the residents of this fine city today and every other day that goes by with taxation without representation:
As a district citizen, I'm looking forward to someday celebrating "Emancipation Day" without a hint of irony.
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