Introduction

The idea of a self-governing people lies at the heart of the American experience. It is deeply enshrined in the justification to the world for the abrupt breach, bloody indeed, with the British Empire. “Taxation without representation” is more than a bumper sticker or an inscription on a Washington license plate. It is the basis for the claim in the founding document of the United States, the Declaration of Independence, for secession, the centerpiece of the nascent country's case to a “candid world” against King George III's “injuries and usurpations,” including the rationale “for imposing Taxes on us without our Consent.” As Thomas Jefferson penned, in his perennial prose, “[t]o secure these [unalienable] rights [among them Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness], Governments are instituted among Man, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

This was indeed a revolutionary statement, foreshadowed, in the American context, only by philosophers of natural rights and the Enlightenment movement in England and France and the colonies themselves.

Surprisingly, though, the denial of statehood for the District of Columbia (DC) and the effective exclusion of its residents, citizens of the United States, from participating in the election of the legislative structures and functions of the Federal government has left a gaping hole in the implementation of the benefits promised by this original document – not unlike the equally great promise of an equally unalienable right, i.e., that “all men are created equal.