We often have issues we need help with on Capitol Hill, but we don’t have a representative. Right now we have nothing. The 600,000 people who live here deserve a representative as much as folks who live outside the [city] line.

Warren Jackson
Lt. Dan Dugan

Warren Jackson, 56, a church choir director and advocate for the homeless, says this is his first protest march. A native of Washington, he now lives in suburban Maryland but still supports the right of district residents to be represented:

As a child, my parents wouldn’t let me come to the [1963] March on Washington. But today I took off from work. It’s obviously very important for D.C. residents to have a vote in Congress. Everybody else in the country has the right to vote for Congress, except in this city. The Republicans for some odd reason don’t want the citizens here to vote. This is my protest against the Republicans’ policies.

The residents of the District of Columbia are overwhelmingly African American and the lack of a congressional representative denies a large number of people of color a vote on Capitol Hill.

The D.C. Voting Rights Act, H.B. 1433, was pulled from the House floor last month after three House Republicans tried to attach a provision that would strip the District of its strict gun laws. The bill is expected to return to the House floor this week. President Bush has threatened to veto the bill if it is passed. The bill would give the district one voting representative in Congress and add a representative for Utah, the next state in line for an additional congressional seat after the last U.S. Census. The bill was introduced by Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.). Norton can vote in House committees but cannot participate in full House votes.

Joslyn Williams, president of the Metropolitan Washington Council (D.C./MD) AFL-CIO, says voting rights for district residents is not just a political issue, it is an issue of fundamental human rights.

This is supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave. We in the District are brave, but we are not free because we do not the right to have our voice heard in the halls of Congress.

It’s not about Democrats or Republicans. It’s about doing what’s right.

Kara Davis, a D.C. resident for the past 10 years, says the reason district residents don’t have a vote in Congress is easy to figure out.

It’s political. When you look at all the constitutional arguments, it all comes down to politics. Plain and simple.

At the rally, a bipartisan group of speakers called on Congress and the White House to support voting rights for district residents. Reps. Norton, Davis, Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) and John Lewis (D-Ga.), Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Jack Kemp, former Republican candidate for vice president, joined district Mayor Adrian Fenty (D) and city Council Chairman Vincent Gray (D) for the rally at the Capitol.

Norton said the Republicans’ maneuver to derail the Voting Rights bill

deserves condemnation, not because it is hard to overcome. It is disgusting because Republicans have only used this kill motion on our bill to give D.C. tax-paying Americans, some on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, a vote in the House.

A poll done for D.C Vote, a coalition of groups that sponsored today’s march, shows four of five Americans (82 percent) support congressional voting representation for district residents.

The national poll, which was conducted in 2005, also found a majority of respondents were unaware that D.C. residents were denied democracy. Again, some four out of five Americans (78 percent) thought D.C. residents have voting rights in Congress equal to those of their fellow Americans.

The poll “certainly gives us a sense of the awareness, or lack thereof, outside the D.C. area and reinforces what we all know in our guts, which is: Once people know about D.C.’s status, they support full voting representation for the District,” said Ilir Zherka, executive director of D.C. Vote.