• United States

Many observers naturally ask: Why do Washingtonians appear to possess so little political power?

The truth is that Washington has long existed in a constitutional gray zone. Unlike the capitals of most other comparable democracies, the populace in Washington is under the control of the federal government and citizens lack the full rights accorded to Americans who live in every other part of the country. For those who reside in the area surrounding the White House and Capitol Hill, taxation without representation remains the norm. Congress maintains control over the city budget. Washingtonians do not have voting representation in the House of Representatives or Senate.

In 1978, a bipartisan coalition of legislators, who were inspired by the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement, attempted to bring to an end this problematic status quo through a constitutional amendment that would guarantee Washington full representation in Congress. Though their effort failed, the movement set off a struggle that continues to this day.

The west front of the U.S. Capitol with cows in the foreground in a painting from 1831. Painting by John Rubens Smith via Library of Congress

The decision to treat the District of Columbia, also known as Washington, D.C., as a property of the federal government stemmed from a number of factors. There were ongoing fears about an anti-government mutiny that had taken place in 1783, during which the Executive Council of Pennsylvania refused to stifle the rebellion. The Founding Fathers concluded that the federal government needed to be situated in an area where elected officials would never have to contend with state and local officials when trying to maintain security. There were also concerns that if the seat of the federal government was located within a state, then that state would enjoy disproportionate power.

In 1790, President George Washington and the U.S. Congress decided to make the District of Columbia the nation’s capital. The District of Columbia Organic Act of 1801 granted Congress complete control over the District of Columbia. Because the district was still largely a rural and underdeveloped area with only about 3,000 inhabitants, and many residents working in politics did not consider it to be a permanent home, there wasn’t much pushback.

After the Civil War, Washington expanded significantly in terms of its urban infrastructure and the size of its population. During the 1860s, the city’s population grew to 131,700, from 75,080. Over 25,000 Black Americans moved into Washington during the 1860s and 1870s. With the number of residents growing, Congress funded improved municipal services. There were also numerous construction projects that resulted in the spread of family residences, urban amenities, and cultural institutions. As part of Reconstruction, there were improvements in political rights. In 1867, the Republican Congress passed the District of Columbia Suffrage Act, which granted voting rights to all eligible men who were living in Washington, the first official legislative act that enfranchised freed Black males. In 1871, Congress created a non-voting delegate who would provide a modicum of representation on Capitol Hill.

The momentum to empower Washingtonians came to a crashing halt in 1874, just like most components of Reconstruction. As part of the political backlash that took form, Congress established a presidentially appointed three person city commission. Moreover, Congress eliminated the non-voting delegate it created a few years earlier. Sen. John Tyler Morgan, who had fought against the Union as a Confederate officer, was blunt about intentions. Congress, he argued, needed to “burn down the barn to get rid of the rats. The rats being the Negro population and the barn being the government of the District of Columbia.”

The city of Washington just kept growing. The population expanded. The city slowly became one of the nation’s major metropolitan areas. And with an expanding federal government, more civil servants made the city their full-time residence.

During the mid-20th century, the political fight over the status of Washington became intertwined with the Civil Rights Movement that sought to end the political and legal strictures supporting racial inequality. As activists forced the nation to reckon with the racial injustice that shaped so much of American society, the situation in the capital came into sharper focus. After all, in 1957, Washington, D.C., had become the nation’s first majority-Black major city, which meant that hundreds of thousands of non-white persons worked, paid taxes, and were eligible for the military draft but could not vote in presidential elections and could not participate in the decisions of Congress. Worse yet, the House and Senate were under the control of a conservative coalition of Southern Democrats and Midwestern Republicans who had no appetite for racial justice, content to go to work as they passed by fellow citizens who were politically powerless. The chairman of the House Committee on the District of Columbia, South Carolina’s John McMillan, epitomized the reactionary Dixiecrats of the period.

The Civil Rights Movement fought to end their reign. In 1961, the states ratified the 23rd Amendment, passed by Congress one year earlier, which granted Washingtonians the power to vote in presidential elections. In 1964, Washington voted overwhelmingly for President Lyndon B. Johnson and his running mate, Senator Hubert Humphrey. To keep up the momentum, Marion Barry, a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, headed a “Free D.C.” movement in the mid-1960s that failed in its efforts to empower the city government but succeeded in generating awareness about the connections between racial injustice and their legal status.

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Johnson was the first president who responded to this push. In 1967, he reorganized the city government by establishing a presidentially appointed “mayor-commissioner” to serve as the chief executive along with a nine-member city council. Johnson, according to Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove in their book, Chocolate City, “saw home rule as a vital part of his overall civil rights strategy….” The urban unrest that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968 further intensified the pressure on legislators to grant locals genuine power so that violence was not the only option to deal with issues such as police abuse and economic inequality. In 1970, by which time 71 percent of the city (537,000 people) was Black, Congress passed the District of Columbia Delegate Act, which reinstated the non-voting delegate to serve in the House of Representatives. President Richard Nixon supported this as a compromise that was not as bold as full representation.

In 1972, McMillan lost his primary to the younger and more liberal John Jenrette. Civil rights leaders, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Walter Fauntroy—who was the district’s first nonvoting delegate—had organized protests against McMillan in his district in the weeks leading up to the primary. After losing his race, McMillan complained that the “colored people were bought out.” The South Carolinian was replaced as chairman of the District of Columbia Committee by Michigan Rep. Charles Diggs, one of the founders of the Congressional Black Caucus and a prominent civil rights advocate, who supported home rule for Washington.

Freed from McMillan’s iron grip, Congress passed the Home Rule Act of 1973. The legislation stipulated that there would be a mayor and a 13-member city council elected by the citizens. To be sure, there were limits to what Congress was willing to do. Legislators retained the power to subject all decisions by the city government to congressional review. The president would also continue to appoint judges, and there would be no full representation in Congress. Moreover, the president retained control over the district’s National Guard (in contrast to the states, where the governors maintained authority). Section 740 allowed the president to use the city’s police force for “federal purposes” for up to 30 days and longer if Congress extends the time frame.

While the Home Rule Act was celebrated as an important victory, civil rights advocates wanted more.

In 1978, a bipartisan coalition pushed for a constitutional amendment to grant Washington full representation in Congress as well as in the Electoral College. Democratic Rep. Don Edwards, a longtime civil rights supporter (his son Lee had been a volunteer in Mississippi as part of Freedom Summer) and the chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights, proposed House Joint Resolution 554. With the support of Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd and Senate Minority Leader Howard Baker, the amendment passed the House on March 2, 1978, with the two-thirds support required, 289 to 127, and the Senate by 67 to 32 on Aug. 22. Sen. Ted Kennedy, the younger brother of the deceased John and Robert Kennedy, managed the bill on the Senate floor. He told his colleagues that the amendment involved the “fundamental rights and human justice” of residents who deserved to “have a voice in the decisions of the Senate and the House.” Congress sent the amendment to the states for ratification.

Fauntroy worked with liberal legislators and civil rights organizations to mount pressure in the states. President Jimmy Carter, elected to office in 1976 against President Gerald Ford, declared: “There should be no doubt that District citizens deserve full voting representation in Congress. First, residents of the District paid over $1 billion in Federal taxes last year, and the per capita tax payment is well above the national average. Second, District residents have fought and died in every war since the War for Independence. During the Vietnam conflict, only three states suffered greater casualties than the District. Third, virtually every other country in the free world already provides full voting representation to the citizens of its capital city.”

Initially, the coalition behind the amendment enjoyed success in several large northern states. In September 1978, New Jersey voted for ratification. In December, Michigan followed, and Ohio did the same. When the new year began, Minnesota and Massachusetts voted to support the amendment in March 1979.

But opponents gathered strength at a time when the burgeoning conservative movement was reshaping American politics. Sen. Ted Stevens argued that the amendment would violate Article V by depriving states of decisions that impacted their equal representation in the Senate. The district, he said, would gain the power of statehood without formally becoming a state. Other conservatives insisted that the amendment would violate the constitutional provision stipulating that the federal government would control the city (which was the purpose, Kennedy reminded them, of changing the law through a constitutional amendment). Rural Southern states feared how two more senators from a Democratic-leaning state would impact their standing. (Louisiana would be the only former Confederate state to support ratification). Ronald Reagan, who was elected president in November 1980, liked to include D.C. statehood among the liberal issues that he said Democrats were pursuing with their “radical” agenda. Phyllis Schlafly’s successful campaign to stop ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment further energized conservatives and dampened the confidence of liberals.

While the fight for ratification gained some renewed momentum in 1983, with a few more states ratifying the amendment, the deadline for ratification passed on Aug. 22, 1985. Only 16 states ratified it.

After the defeat of the amendment, champions of Washington abandoned the pursuit of a constitutional amendment and instead focused on legislation that would officially make Washington a state. Civil rights veteran Eleanor Holmes Norton, who had been elected as the district’s non-voting delegate in 1990, argued that advocates needed to abandon the strategy of “incrementalism.”

Yet the forces of opposition were strong. Congress went even further in clawing back local power despite there being a Democrat, President Bill Clinton, in the White House from 1993 to 2001. The federal government asserted greater control in response to a period with high murder rates, a crack epidemic, and scandals involving Mayor Marion Barry. In 1995, Congress created a Financial Control Board to oversee the problematic finances of the city. Conservative Republicans hardened in their stance against statehood. Trump recently called statehood “ridiculous.”

A demonstrator protests as police forces hold a line near Lafayette Square and the White House in Washington on June 3, 2020. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Five years later, the hopes for statehood seem to have diminished as the reign of MAGA Republicans has forced much of the civil rights agenda off the national agenda. But the core problem remains. Until Congress empowers the citizens of Washington through legislation, the nation’s democracy will never be whole.