No Taxation Without DC Representation — Making Black Votes Matter

President Trump’s chaotic attempt to revive Nixon’s Law & Order strategy by ordering units from three state National Guards and US forces to occupy the District of Columbia has laid bare the injustice of taxing 750,000 mostly black people without representation to pay to have a bunch of mostly white people from Utah invade their city, teargas them in the streets, and run up bills sleeping in fancy hotels.

Getting under the skin of Donald Trump is really too easy, but DC Mayor Muriel Bowser has not only been showing empathy to the protesters, she’s taken her time in the national spotlight to move DC statehood back onto the agenda for racial justice — and has gotten attention with precisely targeted pricks of the president’s fragile ego.

She first tangled with Trump-enabler Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) after she refused to pick up the tab at the Marriott hotel for the Utah National Guard. Lee was outraged that a cash-strapped city during a coronavirus pandemic decided not to pay exorbitant fees to house troops they didn’t invite.

But her best play was renaming a section of 16th Street NW leading to the White House “Black Lives Matter Plaza” and having Black Lives Matter painted on it in “huge, beautiful” letters so Trump couldn’t miss it.

Not surprisingly, Trump erupted in a stream of angry, ungrammatical tweets, but Bowser used her interview time on national news channels to remind Americans that the people of DC — the majority African American — were denied voting representation in both houses of Congress and had no votes in the Electoral College that chose the president.

This lack of representation of taxpaying DC residents is a poisonous cocktail combining Boston Tea Party-level injustice with Dred Scott-level erasure of Black citizens.

Generations of American school children have been told that taxing American colonists without representation in the British parliament was the key issue leading to the revolt against British rule. And after the French and Indian Wars, Britain did spark outrage by taxing the colonies for “their own defense.”

“Taxation without representation is tyranny,” was the slogan that the Sons of Liberty shouted as they tar-and-feathered collectors of the Stamp Act Tax and stole onto British ships and dumped royalist tea into the harbor at the Boston Tea Party.

These are the American legends that libertarians like Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) masturbate to while sitting in their offices waiting to vote against a federal law against lynching black people.

But if the Boston Tea Party is the first event that DC’s lack of representation evokes, the case of Dred Scott, in which the US Supreme Court held that blacks could never be citizens because of their race, is its ugly book-end.

The Civil War and the three amendments to the US Constitution adopted in its wake — sometimes called the Second American Revolution — attempted to wipe away the stain of Dred Scott. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment, affirmed the citizenshipship of African Americans and made Congress the guarantor of the civil rights of former slaves and their decedents. And the Fifteenth Amendment attempted to guarantee their vote.

Those rights were contested and long denied by Jim Crow laws, and when they were regained in the 1960s, the sleepy town of Washington had grown into a metropolis, whose majority-black inhabitants remained without the vote, with their “dream deferred” still delayed.

It’s time for this to change.

Although some scholars have argued that granting statehood to the District would violate the Constitution’s clause empowering Congress to create a capital city, the current belief of many is that this can be done by an act of Congress so long as the new state excludes “federal buildings and monuments, including the principal federal monuments, the White House, the Capitol Building, [and] the U.S. Supreme Court Building,” as H.R. 51 currently pending in Congress provides, and does not impose taxes on federal property.

(The bill was sponsored by the brilliant Eleanor Holmes Norton, DC’s longtime non-voting representative, who if you ask her will tell you the position is an unsatisfactory substitute for real power).

In other words, let the federal government keep its control over its stone edifices, grassy malls, and statues of dead presidents, but give the living residents popular sovereignty over the places where they eat, shop, party and call home.

If the bill or another like it is enacted, DC could petition for statehood, receiving the right to elect two U.S. senators and the number of House members that would be allocated to a state based on its 2020 census population. (The Electoral College could still pose a problem — so let’s just abolish it).

Statehood would also give DC the right to control its own National Guard and to use the Posse Comitatus Act (which bars the use of US armed forces on US soil unless requested by the state’s governor) to keep out unrequested U.S. troops.

And then the individual members of the Utah National Guard — many young and (like the earnest Utahans I’ve met as students) interested in ending racial injustice in their lifetimes — can return to the city as tourists, visiting Dupont Circle shops and the restaurants on 9th Street NW, this time as contributors to the tax base of the new state.

Mayor Bowser’s efforts have already born fruit. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said last week that the Democratic leadership would bring HR 51 to a vote soon.

But it faces a rocky road in Sen. Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) Senate. (By “rocky road” I mean McConnell will block it. With a majority of three, there is no way he wants two almost certainly Democratic new senators to worry about as he clings to the power that sustains him like oxygen sustains humans). Of course, the 2020 election could change this.

DC statehood should be at the top of the racial justice political agenda now and until it is achieved.

Three-quarters of a million Americans, most of them African American, should not still be denied full representation in Congress 224 years after the Declaration of Independence and 150 years since the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteeing the right to vote.

DC statehood should be in the party platforms of both parties, but especially the Democratic Party which aspires but often fails to represent the African Americans that loyally vote for it.

Joe Biden might not be vetting Muriel Bowser as his vice-presidential nominee — and her performance this week merits it — but he should certainly put statehood for the District of Columbia on his ticket.