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Picking the Brains of the Founding Fathers

Experts Clash Over Whether the District Was Meant to Get a Vote in Congress

By Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 28, 2007

The setting is Congress, the year 2007. But as lawmakers wrangle over the D.C. voting rights bill, they are turning the clock back to the 1700s, furiously debating whether the Founding Fathers intended to deprive District residents of a vote in the national legislature.

On one side: the Bush administration and other critics of the bill, who believe the framers created the current situation intentionally. On the other: supporters of the bill, including Eleanor Holmes Norton (D), the District's nonvoting congressional delegate.

It is "slander," she declared heatedly last week, to suggest that the founders would fight a war over voting rights "and then would turn around and deny representation to the residents of their own capital."

Who's right?

Leading historians say the record on the founders' intentions for the future capital is unclear in some respects. But there is little evidence they sought to deny the vote to what would eventually become hundreds of thousands of D.C. residents, the historians say.

Does it matter what a bunch of bewigged 18th-century revolutionaries thought about the District? It actually matters a lot: Their 200-year-old opinions could affect whether the current voting rights bill is deemed legal. The legislation, which seeks to give the District its first full seat in the House of Representatives, has passed the House and is now before the Senate.

The main argument advanced by the bill's opponents is that the Constitution reserves House membership for representatives from states. And the District is not a state, they note.

Supporters and opponents of the bill are delving into history to try to clarify what the framers intended in 1787, when they inserted 38 words into the Constitution allowing for the creation of a federal government district. The brief clause gives Congress the power "to exercise exclusive legislation" over a future seat of government.

Did the framers mean its residents couldn't vote in Congress?

Absolutely, said John P. Elwood, a Justice Department official who testified at a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week. "The framers and their contemporaries clearly understood that the Constitution barred congressional representation for District residents," he said.

Nonsense, retorted Richard P. Bress, a former assistant to the U.S. solicitor general. "I can't agree the evidence shows the Founding Fathers intentionally and permanently disenfranchised the people of the District of Columbia," he told the Senate panel.

Historians say early politicians disagreed about the nature of the future federal seat of government, with some wanting a strong, independent enclave and others fearing it would turn into a new imperial Rome. Political maneuvering colored the discussion.

"There is no one Founding Father position," said John Kaminski, a historian at the University of Wisconsin and editor of a 28-volume collection of documents on the ratification of the Constitution.

But several prominent scholars who have studied the period say there appeared to be little debate on whether residents of the new federal enclave would have the vote.

"The Constitutional Convention overlooked it," said Kenneth Bowling, a George Washington University historian and author of "The Creation of Washington, D.C." "The issue was not on their radar screen."

Historians traditionally have traced the District's status to a raucous demonstration in 1783 by unpaid Revolutionary War veterans outside what's now known as Independence Hall in Philadelphia. The federal Congress, which used the building, was not in session at the time; the rioters were aiming their wrath at a meeting of the Pennsylvania state executive council.

But some congressmen who were proponents of a strong central government seized on the incident, saying it underscored the need for a federal enclave under Congress's control, historians say. They got their way when the Constitution was drawn up.

Soon afterward, Alexander Hamilton and a few other politicians realized the Constitution did not provide specifically for congressional representation for residents of the new capital. Hamilton suggested that the first Congress fix the problem, but his amendment went nowhere.

Opponents of the current bill view the Hamilton amendment as a sign that the issue was debated at the time -- and that Hamilton lost.

"It was as controversial then as it is now," Jonathan Turley, a legal scholar from George Washington University, said at last week's Senate hearing.

But Bowling and other historians disagree, saying the young states and the first U.S. Congress were preoccupied with weightier issues -- such as the amendments that became known as the Bill of Rights.

"They had to organize the entire government!" declared Bowling, co-editor of a 22-volume edition of records and letters from the first federal Congress, which met in 1789-91. "They certainly weren't going to pay a lot of attention to the federal district when it didn't even exist yet."

In fact, it was 1790 before the U.S. government decided where to locate the capital -- on land ceded by Maryland and Virginia. Residents of the new district continued to vote in those states until 1801.

But in that year, Congress passed the Organic Act, assuming control of the District of Columbia and providing no provision for its residents to vote for members of Congress or a president.

That would seem a clear enough sign of Congress's intent. But historians caution that that act, too, should be seen in the context of the politics of the time.

It was passed by a lame-duck Congress fearful that the incoming president, Thomas Jefferson, an anti-federalist, would junk their vision of a strong capital, said William diGiacomantonio, a historian who has studied the period.

The outgoing Congress "really did want to preserve the independence of the District. And so they passed this really haphazard thing," he said, referring to the act.

"It's politics," the historian added. "It doesn't have anything to do with principle."

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Title of article:

Picking the Brains of the Founding Fathers

Experts Clash Over Whether the District Was Meant to Get a Vote in Congress

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Claim 2:

Claim 3:

Evidence for Claim 1:

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Evidence for Claim 2:

Evaluation of claim:

Evidence for Claim 3:

Evaluation of claim:

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