An Unconstitutional Bill
MichaelW on Dec 05 2006 at 4:06 pm | Filed under: Domestic Politics, History, Law, MichaelW's Page
The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.
No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.
U.S. Constitution, Art. I, Sect. 2
There is a very good chance that a patently unconstitutional bill will be passed by the House of Representatives today.
Those who support full congressional representation for District of Columbia residents are making a final push on Tuesday to enact the D.C. Voting Rights Act.
The bill, H.R. 5388, would give the Democrat-majority federal city its first-ever voting member in the U.S. House of Representatives.
[...]
The bill, sponsored by Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) and D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) moved out of the House Government Reform Committee by a vote of 29-4 in May. A Judiciary subcommittee held a hearing in September, where legal scholars and others expressed support for the bill.
The effort to give D.C. residents full representation in Congress has been going on for years. In 2000, the phrase “Taxation Without Representation” started appearing on license tags of vehicles registered in the city.
Opponents have questioned whether a bill giving full congressional representation to residents of a federal city — not a state — is constitutional.
That last paragraph is false. Opponents have not “questioned” whether the bill is unconstitutional, they have asserted unequivocally that it is so; there is simply no question about it. We are a nation of federated States. The federal government was intended to form “a more perfect union” of those States, not to obliterate any political distinction between them altogether. The States are then bound together by a common purpose founded on a common rule of law. As Jonathan Turley puts it:
One of the greatest burdens of being a nation committed to the rule of law is that how we do something is as important as what we do. The Davis proposal would subvert the intentions of the Founders by ignoring textual references to “states” in the Constitution as the sole voting members of the houses of Congress. It also would create a city of half-formed citizens who could vote in the House but not in the Senate.
The constitutional issue is so obvious, in fact, that in order to give D.C. residents the right to vote in Presidential elections, Congress passed the 23rd Amendment (ratified in 1961), and the D.C. Voting Rights Amendment back in 1978, which was never ratified. At some point in the last 30 years, however, I guess they forgot, and now find it perfectly reasonable to change the political structure of our nation by legislative fiat. There’s something very ironic about ignoring the voting rights of an entire country in order to give voting rights to a few citizens.
Does that mean that voting rights for D.C. residents isn’t an issue? Of course not. But that does not make the proposed solution any less unconstitutional. Instead, reduce the actual size of the District and retrocede the residential areas back to Maryland. From the Turley article:
The way to achieve full representation for citizens of the District is to return the city to Maryland and reduce the federal enclave to the core of Capitol Hill and a few of its closest blocks. That is precisely what occurred when the Virginia land taken for the District was “retroceded” to the commonwealth in 1846.
Of course, strong political forces in the District and Maryland would not support retrocession. For one thing, Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. likely would be the last Republican to hold the governorship of that state for some time. Yet before we create hybrid constitutional entities, we should use the most obvious vehicle for giving voting rights to D.C. citizens without a constitutional amendment.
I don’t give a hoot about Republican governors in Maryland (and it should be noted, that Ehrlich was likely to be the last one anyway), anymore than I would care about Democratic governors if D.C. were a predominantly Republican city. The core of the issue is that there is a right way and a wrong way to do this. It says something about the state of modern Congress that they choose the wrong way, despite knowing full well the illegality of their action.
Technorati Tags: D.C. Voting Rights Act, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Rep. Tom Davis, Jonathan Turley, U.S. Constitution, 23rd Amendment, retrocession
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One of the Colbert skits.
Chris B.,
No kidding, I posted about that interview here.
In fact in honor of Michael’s post I think I will promote that to the front page.
[...] Update: Given Michael’s discussion of the attempt to enact the D.C. Voting Rights Act I thought it would be appropriate to bring back this post on one of my favorite pieces from Colbert. ——————————————————————————————— I have no idea whether this was scripted ahead of time or not, but it is just classic. If the course of the interview wasn’t agreed to ahead of time, Norton makes herself look like less of a buffoon than most of Colbert’s victims. This is just hilarious, Colbert is hilarious and Norton is just as funny. I can’t stand her politics, but this is great. Have I said that yet? [...]
I seem to be virtually alone in the view that “ten miles square” is a quaint way of saying “ten square miles” rather than “100 square miles, and oh, by the way, make sure the damned thing is shaped like a square.” If I’m right, most of the District is unconstitutional, so rather than having the federal government retrocede it, we should just acknowledge it was part of Maryland all along. If I’m wrong, though, I’m not sure the federal government can give the land back to Maryland without Maryland’s consent. Most states only have a 30-day return policy, though Virginia’s was a bit longer than that.
I have no idea how the movers and shakers, much less the citizens as a whole, feel but if I was Maryland I would argue hard for not having to take back a whole lot of DC.
That just makes you a rebel.
I would suggest, in order to get around this “policy” that we just leave the area on Maryland’s doorstep with a note.
Or, better yet, we could just start calling all of North and South West D.C. “East Montgomery County”, and all the rest “South Prince George’s County” and see what happens.
Why not just make D.C. a state?
It’s not as if other nations don’t have fundamental political institutions with voting rights whose geographical area is of roughly equivalent size…
the thing is, that would be perceived as even more of a giveaway to the liberals than just granting voting rights.
Another thing, as DC is currently setup now, there are universities and residential housing within, oh, five blocks of the US capitol. And the federal institutions are enmeshed in the district like poppy seed on the bun. You’d either have to evict lots and lots of people to form a contiguous non-residential federal area, of else you’d have some really pyschedelic district borders…
That would be unconstitutional as well.
I also would like to point out that out of consistency you should now want all the bill’s supporters impeached an removed from office. The “Rule of Law” and all that;^)
Lance,
touche, huh?
Out of consistency, I would like to point out the following:
1): This bill may end up having almost everyone in Congress vote for it.
2) impeaching and removing the whole legislature for office for collectively undermining the law could possibly undermine the basic political stability of our nation and could therefore
3) threaten our national security - (how could we pass funding for the war in Iraq with all those elections? etc)
4) therefore, making this case to the public threatens to make everyone’s impeachement a *requirement* of the rule of law, therefore
5) by making this argument to the public, you are threatening national security
6) and since the Republicans have failed to complain about this through the established channels, despite being aware of it,
7) you, as a member of the media, are basically breaking the law yourselves and should go to jail.
Seriously though, if it plainly violates the constitution, and gets plainly struck down by the court, that’s cool with me.
some other solution that grants DC citizens voting rights must be provided, though. Despite that I nit-picked the suggested solution, it would be allright. The lack of voting rights for US citizens seems to also be a constitutional problem, does it not? If not, it sure seems like the sort of thing that would be, don’t it?
glasnost,
It would be wrong in my mind for it to happen, but if everybody who votes for this bill were to be removed from office I am quite sure that it would leave a congress that suits my legislative goals for the most part. I figure what would be left would certainly include all of the the Republican study group, the liberty caucus and Ron Paul. Talk about reducing spending and the reach of government. Despite all my attempts at principled and consistent stands, I might just sell out for that deal, so don’t tempt me.