District of Columbia House Voting Rights Act of 2007--Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA HOUSE VOTING RIGHTS ACT OF 2007--MOTION TO PROCEED -- (Senate - September 18, 2007)

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. DODD. Mr. President, today we will vote on whether or not to take up one of the most important pieces of civil rights and voting rights legislation the Senate will consider in this Congress: the DC House Voting Rights Act of 2007. After months of careful consideration by the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, floor action on this bill has been blocked by a filibuster. We will soon see if there are sufficient votes to break that filibuster and enable it to move forward. We are in this procedural position because some of my Republican colleagues have persistently refused to even allow the Senate to take up and debate this measure, insisting on throwing up procedural roadblocks all along the way. I urge my colleagues to vote to bring this bill to the floor, and if that effort succeeds, to support its adoption.

There is nothing more fundamental to the vitality and endurance of a democracy of the people, by the people, and for the people than the people's right to vote. In the words of Thomas Paine: ``The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected.'' It is, in fact, the right on which all others in our democracy depend. The Constitution guarantees it, and the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly underscored that it is one of our most precious and fundamental rights as citizens.

Although not all Americans were entitled to vote in the early days of the Republic, virtually all legal restrictions on the franchise have since been eliminated, including those based on race, sex, wealth, property ownership, and marital status. Americans living in the Nation's Capital also deserve to have voting representation in the body that makes their laws, taxes them, and can call them to war.

Even with most explicit barriers to voting removed, we still have a way to go before we get to the point where all Americans are able to participate without obstacle in our elections, and with confidence in the voting systems they use. In the 2000 Presidential election, 51.2 percent of the eligible American electorate voted. And although in the 2004 Presidential election voting participation reached its highest level since 1968, only 60.7 percent of eligible Americans voted. That dropped back down, in the 2006 off-year elections, to just over 40 percent. We should do everything we can to strengthen voter registration efforts and to move the election reform process forward in this Congress, and at the same time to extend voting representation to the nearly 600,000 people--hard-working, taxpaying U.S. citizens who fight for our country and serve on juries and fulfill their other civic duties--who live within the borders of the District of Columbia.

I know that some opponents argue that the reasons the Founders made the Nation's Capital a separate district, rather than locate it within a State, remain sound, and therefore we should not tinker with their work, even at the cost of continued disenfranchisement of DC's citizens. That argument ignores the fundamental commitment we all must have to extending the franchise to all Americans. And it ignores the fact that article I of the Constitution explicitly gives Congress legislative authority over the District ``in all cases whatsoever.'' The courts have over time described this power as ``extraordinary and plenary'' and ``full and unlimited,'' and decades of legislative and judicial precedents make clear that the simple word ``states'' in article I (which provides that the House of Representatives ``shall be composed of members chosen ..... by the people of the several states''), does not trump, Congress's legislative authority to grant representation in the House to citizens of the District.

I know that Senator Hatch, Lieberman, and others have already thoroughly covered this important legal ground, so I will not belabor the history. But when even conservative legal scholars--from Judges Ken Starr and Patricia Wald to former Assistant Attorney General Viet Dinh--have done exhaustive legal analyses which outline the positive case for Congress ceding representational rights to citizens of the District, you know there is a strong case to be made. In any event, it is clear to me that these important constitutional questions should ultimately be resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court, and enactment of this bill would enable us to do just that. If opponents of the bill are so certain of their constitutional arguments, they should, it seems to me, allow those arguments to be tested in the full light of day, in the courts, and resolved once and for all. The bill provides for expedited consideration of appropriate court challenges. If it were to be enacted and then struck down because of constitutional infirmities, it would then be clear that a constitutional amendment is the only viable alternative left to DC citizens.

This is the latest in a series of proposals to extend full rights of representation to voters in the District. In 1978, with overwhelming bipartisan support, both Chambers of Congress passed the DC voting rights constitutional amendment, which would have given District residents voting representation in the House and the Senate, by two-thirds majority in each Chamber. The amendment required 38 States to ratify it, but it fell short. In 1993, the House voted to give partial voting representation to the DC delegate in the ``Committee of the Whole'' of the House, unless her vote actually determined the outcome, in which case it would not be counted. That is obviously no real voting ``right'' at all, if it can be taken away when it really counts.

There have been many differing proposals over the years to extend the right to vote to DC citizens, from constitutional amendments to statehood legislation to retrocession proposals. Since many Americans would be shocked to learn that something as basic as voting representation is now withheld from certain of our citizens, and it is coming in a particular historical context in which Utah is poised to gain an additional House seat due to its growing population, let me describe briefly what this bill would actually do.

First, it would create two new permanent seats in the House of Representatives, one for the District of Columbia and the other for Utah. An election for the seat in DC would be held in 2008 and the new representative would be sworn in for the 111th Congress. The bill explicitly states that DC can only be considered one district and receive only one seat in all future censuses.

It also repeals the District of Columbia delegate and other related language once a full voting representative is sworn into the 111th Congress. Finally, it would allow the State of Utah to create a Fourth District, not an at-large seat, using census data from 2000. The election for that seat would be held in 2008. This seat would be guaranteed to Utah for the 111th Congress and the 112th Congress until another census is done and new districts are made in 2012. It also explicitly says that the District should not be considered a State for the purpose of representation in the Senate; that question is left for another day.

Mr. President, as my colleague Senator Hatch has observed, there are really two fundamental questions here for the Senate to consider. The first is the constitutional question about whether Congress may enact legislation to address this issue. The second is an essentially political question about whether we should enact such legislation. I have briefly addressed the first. On the second, I think there really should not be much of a debate. Citizens of the District, a majority of them African-Americans, who fulfill all of the duties of citizenship, ought to have the right to vote and be represented in Congress as decisions are made about their taxes, about war and peace, or about any of the myriad other questions that Congress faces every day.

This is not a perfect bill. There are provisions of it that some oppose, and that I might have drawn differently. But it is an exquisitely balanced compromise, and I believe it deserves our support. I commend Chairman Lieberman and Ranking Minority Member COLLINS for developing the bill, and I congratulate the majority leader for bringing it to the floor today. We know it enjoys the support of a large majority of Americans--over 80 percent in national polls support the proposition that DC residents should be represented in Congress. I hope it will garner the broad support in the Senate it deserves. I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to vote aye to enable this measure to come to the floor, and to support it when it does.

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