JUDGES RULE D.C. LACKS RIGHT TO VOTE IN CONGRESS
By Bill Miller, Washington Post Staff Writer, Tuesday , March 21, 2000 ; Page B01

A federal court panel ruled yesterday that District residents do not have a legal right to a vote in Congress, dealing a blow to a coalition of community leaders and political activists who hoped their arguments about fairness and democratic principles would help overturn 199 years of federal tradition.

In its 2 to 1 decision, the panel acknowledged that it is an "inequity" that D.C. residents may not choose voting members in Congress as residents of the 50 states do. But the court majority said that the Constitution and Supreme Court have created a precedent for that inequity and that those seeking voting rights for the District should turn to the political process, not the courts.

"Many courts have found a contradiction between the democratic ideals upon which this country was founded and the exclusion of District residents from congressional representation," the panel's majority wrote. "All, however, have concluded that it is the Constitution and judicial precedent that create the contradiction."

The ruling came in two lawsuits filed by separate sets of D.C. activists. The D.C. government joined in one of the suits, hoping to accomplish through the courts what decades of lobbying had failed to achieve for the city, which currently is allowed one nonvoting delegate in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The plaintiffs have spent nearly two years in the quest for a milestone in D.C. history; many of them were part of the movement that in 1973 persuaded Congress to allow limited home rule for the city.

Despite yesterday's setback, attorneys for the voting rights supporters were encouraged that one of the three judges on the panel wrote a lengthy dissenting opinion supporting many of their arguments. They now plan to take their fight to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Justice Department argued for preserving the status quo, pointing to language in the Constitution that calls for the election of representatives by people from the "states." Because the District is not a state, its residents do not have a constitutional right to select a voting representative in Congress, the Justice Department said.

The majority opinion sided with that interpretation. It was written by Merrick B. Garland, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, of U.S. District Court. In the dissent, Senior U.S. District Judge Louis F. Oberdorfer wrote that his colleagues were too technical in their reading of the word "states" and that he found nothing in the Constitution that says people living in the seat of government should have no voting representation in Congress.

Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) said he was "deeply disappointed" with the ruling and expressed hope that the Supreme Court will "address this case as soon as possible, and breathe life into American democracy in America's capital."

"Over the last 200 years, residents of the District of Columbia have fought in nine wars and paid billions of dollars in federal taxes," Williams said. "We have marched and sacrificed to help extend democratic freedoms to people in faraway lands as well as here at home. Yet in our nation's capital--the epicenter of democracy--we lack the most fundamental democratic right of all: the right to vote."

Corporation Counsel Robert R. Rigsby agreed. "It's pretty amazing if you stop and think about it," he said. "How can you in good faith deny the rights of over 500,000 people?"

In one of the strangest twists in the dispute, Rigsby said he was compelled to respond to media inquiries on his own time. Congress attached riders to the past two D.C. budget bills barring the D.C. government from spending any of its money on the voting rights case. As a result, the District has depended on a cadre of lawyers working pro bono, or free, including former deputy corporation counsel Walter A. Smith Jr. and Charles A. Miller and others from the firm of Covington & Burling.

One of the lawsuits, Adams et al. v. Clinton et al., wanted the court to make it possible for D.C. residents to choose statehood or unite with another state, such as Maryland. The other suit, Alexander et al. v. Daley et al., wanted the court to order Congress to find a way to let D.C. residents elect full senators and representatives. The court dismissed issues concerning the Senate on procedural grounds.

The Adams complaint was pushed by a group of 20 activists led by lawyer George S. LaRoche. LaRoche said he was outraged by the ruling, calling it "the most fundamental denial of due process one could imagine."

The D.C. government joined 57 residents in the Alexander lawsuit. Those plaintiffs include a who's-who list of Washington community leaders, such as former mayor Walter E. Washington, civil rights leaders Dorothy I. Height and Roger Wilkins, business leaders Deborah Lee, John W. Hechinger Sr. and Clifford L. Alexander, Howard University President H. Patrick Swygert and George Washington University President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg.

The judges--convened as a special panel because the case concerned a matter of congressional apportionment--heard legal arguments 11 months ago at a hearing attended by hundreds of voting rights supporters. As months went by without a ruling, advocates began hoping they had achieved a breakthrough.

But the delay apparently was caused by an exhaustive review of the Constitution, court precedents, and history performed by the judges. The majority opinion was a weighty 78 pages; Oberdorfer's dissent was 69.

The majority opinion expressed sympathy for the D.C. cause, saying that "like our predecessors, we are not blind to the inequity of the situation."

Although the majority said it could not break new legal ground, Oberdorfer said core democratic principles required that D.C. residents get a vote in Congress.
"A republican, that is representative, form of government is a keystone in the Constitution's structure, a keystone hewn directly from the Declaration of Independence," Oberdorfer wrote. "The denial of representation was one of the provocations that generated the declaration and the war that implemented it."