The House delivered a bipartisan rebuke Thursday to the District of Columbia over its new law allowing noncitizens — including illegal immigrants — to cast ballots in local elections.

Republicans cast the vote as part of a broader attempt to defend citizenship against attempts to dilute its value and put citizens on par with temporary visitors and unauthorized migrants.

“Put citizenship back in its rightful place as the gold standard,” said Rep. August Pfluger, Texas Republican, who wrote the legislation.

It passed on a 262-143 vote with more than Democrats joining the GOP and underscoring the political potency of the issue.

Democrats who opposed the bill chided the GOP over the vote, saying Congress should have been tackling gun violence or a warming earth rather than spending time meddling in the local affairs of the nation’s capital. One Democrat said he wouldn’t accept lectures about the importance of voting from Republicans who refused to certify the 2020 election results.

“It is hypocrisy we’re seeing here today in this debate,” said Rep. Robert Garcia, California Democrat.

Noncitizen voting is illegal in federal elections, but some cities are experimenting with it for local contests, and the District’s policy is one of the most ambitious.

It allows those who have been residents in the city for at least 30 days to register and cast ballots for mayor, city council, school and advisory commissions and other local questions.

That includes those here without any legal status. According to Republicans, it could even include agents of adversary nations, such as a Russian spy working for the Russian embassy.

D.C.’s city council approved the noncitizen policy in late 2022, enacting it over Mayor Muriel Bowser’s opposition.

Given Democrats’ control of the Senate, Thursday’s repeal bill is little more than political messaging.

Indeed, just minutes after the House approved the bill, the Senate voted on its own version of legislative messaging with a do-over vote on a bill that includes President Biden’s preferred border security changes.

Opposition was bipartisan, though for different reasons. Republicans said Mr. Biden’s border plan didn’t go far enough, while Democratic opponents said it went too far.

By contrast, the D.C. repeal bill drew significant bipartisan support, with 52 Democrats joining the GOP.

That’s 10 more Democrats than voted for a similar measure early last year, indicating a growing unease about the practice of noncitizen voting.

Noncitizen voting used to be a fairly standard practice in the early days of the country, when states were far more heterogeneous in their rules on who qualified as a voter.

The practice faded over the 19th century, and by the early 20th century was effectively ended.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, Maryland Democrat, said most of the country didn’t see a need to bar noncitizens at the founding because it had other, tighter limits.

“The basic logic was if you are a white male property owner, it doesn’t make any difference what your citizenship is,” he said.

Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s nonvoting representative to Congress, said the bill was an affront to democracy. She said the city’s council made its will known, and it is “paternalistic” for Capitol Hill to intervene.

The vote is unlikely to cool the interest in noncitizen voting from deep-blue cities and towns, where the idea is gaining adherents. Some allow illegal immigrants with tentative legal status to vote, but the District’s plan is highly permissive in applying to even short-term visitors and illegal immigrants.

Mr. Raskin, who led opposition to the bill, said he has seen no evidence of foreign adversaries voting and he also doubted illegal immigrants would register.

“It would of course be crazy for an undocumented person to attach their name to a public and transparent document like a voter registration document,” he said.

Other jurisdictions that allow noncitizen voting have generally seen low turnout from that population. The District is working to try to reverse that trend, sending out instructions for how folks can get registered.

Mr. Raskin said some 512 noncitizens have registered, joining a voting population of roughly half a million.

Rep. Clay Higgins, Louisiana Republican, said there are an estimated 50,000 noncitizens who could register and he figures many more will do so as elections approach.

• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.