Trying to Right The Wrong Done To People of D

Trying to Right The Wrong Done To People of D.C.

By Marc Fisher

Washington Post

Tuesday, April 16, 2002

Chanting "Taxation without representation is tyranny!" hundreds of Washingtonians last evening burned copies of their 1040s in a trash can on 17th Street NW to protest the fact that we pay federal taxes yet have zero representation in Congress, zero say in how our money is spent.

Today in Geneva, Tim Cooper, a stalwart in the battle for D.C. voting rights, will stand before the U.N. Commission on Human Rights to focus the eyes of the world on this city's colonial status. "Mr. Chairman, members of the Commission," Cooper's speech reads, "I wish to direct the world's attention to a human rights case about the denial of equal civil and political rights to the people of the capital city of the United States of America -- Washington, D.C."

And sometime in the next few months, despite vehement opposition from our State Department, the Organization of American States will release its long-confidential report blasting the United States for depriving Washingtonians of the vote.

Those who believe that the District will never win its place as an equal in this country need to start revising their thinking. A wrong this monumental will not stand.

Freedom House, the nonprofit that annually determines whether the world's nations are Free, Partly Free, or Not Free, defines freedom as "the right of all adults to vote and compete for public office, and for elected representatives to have a decisive vote on public policies."

The United States, of course, sits proudly atop the rankings of the Free. Yet its treatment of its capital would make our country Partly Free, at

best.

Cooper's words to representatives of more than 100 nations clash with the image and history of this democracy: "The nearly 600,000 residents of this city have been barred under the U.S. Constitution from exercising their fundamental human right to political participation in their country's

national legislature for 200 years. They have not been permitted to cast a single vote in the U.S. Congress -- the highest bicameral deliberative body of the nation -- since the city's inception. They continue to be denied that right until today. There is no other federal capital anywhere in the world that denies its citizens equal political participation in their own national legislature."

"It's taken me nine years to get here," Cooper told me from Geneva. "This is very, very exciting. We could soon have the U.N. and the OAS saying that the United States is in direct violation of their charters."

Closer to home, D.C. Vote, a voting rights advocacy group, went to the trouble of acquiring three permits to stage last evening's bonfire of the

1040s -- a police permit to hold a demonstration, a public space permit to use the sidewalks near Farragut Square and a burn permit from the fire

marshal to incinerate the tax forms.

"It was a bit like the hoops we're jumping through to end our disenfranchisement," said Kevin Kiger, a publicist for D.C. Vote and the guy who devoted three days of his life to making the stunt possible. Kiger and other voting rights activists see an opportunity in the war on

terrorism. "There's a lot of precedent for Americans recognizing civil rights when faced with such challenges to our democracy," he said.

Young people won the vote in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, women got their franchise after World War I, and blacks attained voting rights after the Civil War. Could this war open American eyes to the injustice of depriving Washington's citizens of representation?

It won't happen of its own accord. The education job that lies ahead is daunting. Political commentator Mark Plotkin, who is taking his passion for

D.C. rights from public radio to all-news WTOP, is leading a crusade to get the District the same representation in the Capitol's Statuary Hall as every state -- two statues per state. When I mentioned this to a formercongressman the other day, he scoffed and said, "That's ridiculous. Who

would they put in there -- Boss Shepherd and Marion Barry?"

The statue we eventually place in the Capitol will represent the leader who finally achieves for Washingtonians what we were always meant to have, the most basic right in any democracy, the vote.