Section 1. The District constituting the seat of Government of the United States shall appoint in such manner as the Congress may direct:. A number of electors of President and Vice President equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives in Congress to which the District would be entitled if it were a State, but in no event more than the least populous State; they shall be in addition to those appointed by the States, but they shall be considered, for the purposes of the election of President and Vice President, to be electors appointed by a State; and they shall meet in the District and perform such duties as provided by the twelfth article of amendment.
Washington, D. Skip to main content. A Free Press? A New Aristocracy? I Voted, Did You? How Diverse Should the Citizenry Be? In fact, as far as we can tell, as Judge Oberdorfer of the D. Clinton D. The practice would continue for a decade until Congress adopted the Organic Act in and assumed full authority over District government. For example, with respect to the House of Representatives, the argument goes: 1 the right of any citizen to full House representation rests exclusively in Article I; 2 Article I provides that only qualified citizens have the right to be represented in the House of Representatives; 3 a citizen is qualified under Article I if he or she is a resident of a state; 4 the District of Columbia is not a state; therefore 5 District residents are not qualified under Article I and have no voting rights.
However, the question of whether the District should be declared or called a state is separate from—and in a way less important than—the question of whether the people of the District should have full representation in Congress. Today, the Twenty-Third Amendment, giving the people of the District the right to choose electors to participate in the elections of the President and Vice President, together with the Home Rule Act, giving the District the right to elect a Mayor and Council, have gone some way in bringing District residents closer to full citizenship.
But it still remains that the District has no voting representative in the Senate or the House, no final control over its taxes, and no dominion even over its laws, which Congress can overrule when it so chooses. This quasi-colonial relationship is often explained away with claims on the one hand that congressional representation would result in the District having outsized power given its small geographic footprint and small population, and on the other hand that any disadvantages to not having full legislative representation are more than outweighed by the supposed financial benefits the District receives from its relationship with the federal government.
But, the reality that a population larger than that of Vermont or Wyoming lives as second-class citizens is perhaps less remarkable than the fact that there is no definitive evidence that under the constitutional order it was ever intended that it be so.
Senator Orrin G. Both the Amendment and the argument for D. The premise is false for at least four reasons: 1. As the capital of the country, the District enjoys advantages not possessed by any State.
No one State should be home to and legislate for and have power over the capital of all the States. Prior to the Twenty-Third Amendment, citizens living in D. Since adoption of the Twenty-Third Amendment, U. Originally, the District of Columbia contained two counties divided by the Potomac, Washington and Alexandria. Washington, ceded by Maryland, encompassed about twice the size of Alexandria, ceded by Virginia.
The District constituting the seat of Government of the United States shall appoint in such manner as Congress may direct: A number of electors of President and Vice President equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives in Congress to which the District would be entitled if it were a State, but in no event more than the least populous State; they shall be in addition to those appointed by the States, but they shall be considered, for the purposes of the election of President and Vice President, to be electors appointed by a State; and they shall meet in the District and perform such duties as provided by the twelfth article of amendment.
Today, that amendment remains obscure and…. In this session, students learn about voting rights in America through a historical exploration of the right to vote in America.
0コメント