Rights and Wrong

It's the District's time for a vote in the House.

HISTORIC legislation giving the people of the District a vote in their national government is being debated in the House of Representatives. Prospects for its passage have never been better. The Democrats who control the House have kept a promise to move the bill forward, but the disenfranchisement of American citizens shouldn't be about partisan politics. It should be about what is right and wrong.

Indeed, the legislation working its way through the House sprang from the sense of injustice of a Republican House member from suburban Virginia. Rep. Thomas M. Davis III believes it is grotesque that D.C. residents are denied congressional representation. He came up with an ingenious way to get politics out of the equation. Two seats would be added to Congress -- one for the mostly Democratic District and the other for heavily Republican Utah. The bill is on a fast track thanks to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.). The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee approved the measure yesterday, with every Democrat and six Republicans voting for it. The Judiciary Committee now takes it up, and a battle is expected.

It's hard to make a case for depriving people of a voice in Congress when they pay federal taxes, serve on federal juries and send family members off to war. It's also pretty embarrassing that the United States, while preaching democracy to the rest of the world, remains the only democratic country where people in the capital city are without representation. So opponents of D.C. voting rights have latched onto the only argument they can make with a straight face -- that the bill is unconstitutional.

Former judges and constitutional scholars such as Kenneth Starr, Patricia Wald and Viet Dinh, not to mention the American Bar Association, believe the bill is constitutional. They argue that Congress has repeatedly treated the District as if it were a state and that this treatment has been upheld. For his part, Mr. Davis has delved into history to make a compelling argument that the lack of a vote was never the aim of the Founding Fathers but rather an "undemocratic accident."

We concede that serious people hold the contrary view. No court has ever weighed in on the D.C. Voting Rights Act, so the constitutional question is open. That, though, is an issue for the courts to decide, in the event of a legal challenge. It should not be an excuse for Congress to continue to deny a basic right to more than half a million people.