Mar 24, 2018 3 min read

The license plates on the cars of the residents of our nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., say “Taxation Without Representation.” They do so to protest the fact that they pay many taxes, but they are alone among U.S. citizens in lacking full political representation.

That is because Washington is a city, not a state, and the Constitution allows only “the people of the several States” to vote in national elections for the president and members of the House of Representatives. Further, although the Constitution originally said senators were to be chosen by state legislatures, when the 17th Amendment required that senators also be elected by popular vote, that vote too was restricted to residents of the 50 states.

That said, thanks to the 23rd Amendment, ratified this week (March 29) in 1961, in 1964 Washingtonians voted for the first time in a presidential election. The 23rd Amendment says voting-age residents of the District of Columbia may vote for the president and vice president in presidential elections, although, given Washington’s small population (approximately 620,000 residents), Washington is only allotted three electors, the same as the seven least populist states.

Still, while Washington is a city, it is also home to the national government, so in 1970 Congress passed a law giving Washington one non-voting delegate (as opposed to a voting representative) to the House of Representatives. Congress also tolerated, although it never approved, the D.C. government’s creation of two “shadow senators,” who are elected by the voters but are neither sworn in nor have seats in the Senate, and obviously can’t vote for or against legislation.

In voting to give Washington a non-voting House member and allowing its two shadow senators, Congress believed that neither it nor the D.C. government was violating the Constitution’s requirement that only state residents can send voting representatives and senators to Congress. To that end, Congress insisted that if Washington was to have the same voting representation in Congress that the states have, another constitutional amendment is required. In 1978, such an amendment was proposed, but ultimately failed.

One reason it failed is that Washington’s population is predominantly liberal, so Washingtonians tend to elect Democrats. In the aforementioned 1964 presidential election, Washingtonians massively voted for the Democratic candidate, Lyndon Johnson, who easily defeated the Republican, Barry Goldwater.

Thus, unsurprisingly, while Democrats widely supported an amendment giving D.C. residents full voting rights, Republicans did not, and although the amendment passed in Congress, enough “red” (Republican) states prevented the amendment from achieving the three-fourths majority required to be ratified. The idea of the Democratic Party having an automatic additional vote in the House, and two extra votes in the Senate, did not sit well with Republicans.

Bruce G. Kauffmann’s email address is bruce@historylessons.net.