Finally Taxation WITH Representation in DC?

D.C has its first chance in a long time to finally be fully represented in the union. The bill is currently working its way through the House and Senate and would likely get 60 Senate votes to defeat a Republican filibuster and would be signed by President Obama. However what could stand in the way are the courts. Slate reports:

Supporters of D.C. voting rights have pushed for years to get this bill through Congress. (D.C. residents already have a delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton, who can serve on committees but when it counts can't vote on final bills.) The district's supporters came close in 2007 with a measure that also would have created a new congressional seat for Utah (which was next in line among the states, given congressional reapportionment earlier this decade). Despite this neat attempt at partisan balance (a Democrat for D.C., a Republican for Utah), Republicans filibustered the measure after a threatened veto by President George W. Bush. Things are different this time. President Barack Obama co-sponsored the 2007 version of the bill, and the current one in the Senate is worded identically. There's a chance supporters can muster 60 votes in the Senate to defeat a filibuster.

If that political battle is won, the war will shift to the courts, where it faces uncertain prospects. The constitutional claim against the D.C. Voting Rights Act is that Congress lacks the power to create a new congressional seat for the district. There's a strong textual argument for this position, advanced by George Washington University law profesor Jonathan Turley and others. Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution provides that "[t]he House of Representatives shall be composed of members chosen every second year by the people of the several states …" and there's no question that Washington, D.C., is not a state. Congress cannot amend the Constitution through ordinary legislation simply by calling D.C. a "state," and therefore the D.C. act is ostensibly unconstitutional. Supporters like Turley have backed up their arguments with extensive historical analysis based on the Framers' intent in giving the District of Columbia its odd status.

Perhaps surprisingly, some conservative heavy hitters (who tend to favor textualist and originalist interpretations of the Constitution) nonetheless have come out in favor of the constitutionality of the measure. Ken Starr has argued that Article I elsewhere, in what's called the District Clause, authorizes House representation for the district by providing that "[t]he Congress shall have power … to exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever" over the District of Columbia. Profesor Viet Dinh, who worked as an assistant attorney general in the Bush administration, has made similar arguments that Congress' power under this Clause is plenary, and he backs it up with his own analysis of the Framers' intent.

The debate also centers on an obscure 1949 Supreme Court case, National Mutual Insurance Co vs. Tidewater Transfer Co. Tidewater considered the constitutionality of a 1940 congressional statute, which provided that federal courts should consider residents of Washington, D.C., as coming from "states" for purposes of "diversity jurisdiction." (That's the legal framework that allows federal courts to hear cases arising under state law when a resident of one state sues the resident of another.) In a fractured decision, the Supreme Court upheld the 1940 law, despite an earlier 1805 Supreme Court ruling holding that D.C. residents could not be considered residents of states for diversity jurisdiction purposes.