With the harassing robo-calls, the threats of "show up on election day, get arrested," and so on and so forth, we saw once again in this election cycle that the Republican Party just isn't above standing between the American voter and his or her vote. While Democrats have an opportunity in this next Congress to claim the mantle of being the party that, you know, actually wants you to get in that booth and pick for your next elected official, real election reform is enormously difficult. Still, there's one pro-voting win we can put on the board right away.
First, the problem. If you're a full-time resident of Washington DC, there is no United States Senator representing you in the United States Senate; there is one "delegate" in the House who has many of the same rights as a real congressperson but cannot vote for or against legislation. When the House was considering the Iraq War Resolution, because I lived and paid taxes in DC, there wasn't a single person up on Capitol Hill who I could call to say "hey, don't do that on my behalf." No one was charged with representing my interests and those of my nearly half-million neighbors. (Don't worry about your congressman who lives in DC and only goes back to his district every six months. He still gets to vote in his home state.) If you want to get into the weeds on the issue, DC Vote has a history of how this all came to be.
There are all sorts of reasons why it's so distasteful for an American to have no representation on Capitol Hill, but I'm going to rely on the cheap gut shot. While I and my DC compatriots had no say (via proxy, of course) on whether we went to war in Iraq, three sons of the District have been killed there so far.
There's no reason for this to be the case. The United States is the only democracy in the world where residents of its capital city have no representation in its legislature. We haven't fixed it this far because Republicans have controlled Congress for the last 12 years and, well, George Bush got 9% of the vote in the District in 2004. Fair representation for DC means more Dems in Congress, simple as that.
But the relevant bill with the strongest support in Congress, the DC Fair and Equal House Voting Rights Act (H.R. 5388), would mitigate the horror of adding an additional Democrat to represent a half-million people who actually want a Democrat to represent them by giving Utah an additional at-large House seat to do with what they see fit -- Utah, because it was about 1,000 people shy of getting another seat after the 2000 census (and counting heads in Utah is challenging anyway because of the Mormon missionaries who are out in Guatemala when the census-taker comes by) and at-large, so that they don't gerrymander the districts to get rid of the seat held by Jim Matheson. They get a Republican, DC gets a Democrat, the House bumps up to 437 members.
Is H.R. 5388 the way to go? I dunno yet. Part of me thinks that the whole "at-large" business for the Utah seat is too convoluted. But a democracy based on free and fair representation should be part of the Democratic rallying cry. Democrats are the party that believes that every American should be represented in our democracy -- even if they happen to lay their heads down at night within the boundaries of Washington DC.
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