Democrats Pull D.C. Voting Rights Bill off of the Floor

  According to this article the Democrats have pulled the D.C. Voting Rights Act off of the table and there will be no vote on it. The article states that the conservative (Blue Dog) Democrats were not going to support the bill and thus it was removed from the calender.

  While you may agree or disagree with whether the residents of Washington D.C. should have a voting representative in the house the bottom line is that this bill was unconstitutional and it should have been defeated for this reason alone.

  Article 1 Section 2 states that “The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States.” Needless to say, Washington DC is not a state and under the constitution is not eligible for a representative in congress. If the politicians feel that Washington D.C. should have a voting representative in congress the constitution spells out the correct way to amend it. That is the proper procedure to follow, the same procedure that was followed in 1961 that gave D.C. residents the right to vote.

  I don’t have a strong feeling either way on whether Washington D.C. should have a voting representative in Washington but I do want to see the constitution adhered to, and this bill would have been unconstitutional.

  But there is one little interesting aspect to this story. This is the same bill that had another unconsitutional aspect to it. Dick Durbin attached a bill  “to encourage and promote diversity in communication media ownership, and to ensure that the pubic airwaves are used in the public interest.” The fairness doctrine under another name. An unconstitutional attack on the freedom of speech and of the press.

  In the same bill Jim Demint also attached the “Broadcaster Freedom Act,” to ban the fairness doctrine. These two competing amendments were added to the same bill. So there was allot of interesting maneuvering with this bill. One has to wonder if there was more than meets the eye with regards to this bill being killed.