CE Week #6: “GOP hurts itself denying D.C. vote”
DeWayne Wickham
Gannett News Service
October 6, 2007
There’s a war raging inside the Republican Party.
You may not have noticed because it’s not being fought in the trenches of the presidential selection process. This low-intensity fight is being waged in the halls of Congress – and it threatens to push the GOP into the political abyss that swallowed up the Know Nothing Party.
In a fratricidal firefight a few days ago, Republicans stopped the Senate from voting on a bill that would give the District of Columbia’s congressional representative full voting rights. In doing so, they were at war with themselves.
The measure was backed by GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, former Rep. Jack Kemp and Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. It also was supported by two of the nation’s most prominent black Republicans: former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, and J.C. Watts, the former Oklahoma congressman who held the fourth highest leadership position among House Republicans before retiring in 2003.
But the bill also had powerful Republican opponents. Chief among them were President Bush and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.
In April, the House passed the bill on a 241-177 vote. But a few days ago, the Senate fell three votes short of the 60 needed to overcome a procedural hurdle that blocked the body from voting on the measure. At the urging of McConnell – and backed by a Bush veto threat – 41 of 49 Senate Republicans voted against the motion.
Supporters of the measure say not giving D.C.’s lone member of Congress full voting rights amounts to “taxation without representation.”
Opponents argue that giving the nation’s capital – whose population is 57 percent black – a full-fledged voting member of Congress would violate the Constitution, which says members of the House should be selected by “people of the several states.”
But earlier this month, Kenneth Starr, a conservative Republican who was appointed to a federal judgeship by President Reagan and served as U.S. solicitor general for President George H.W. Bush, disputed that position.
The Constitution gives Congress the power “to exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever” over the District of Columbia,” Starr pointed out in an op-ed article he co-wrote with Patricia Wald for the Washington Post. Starr’s position is supported by an impressive array of fellow Republicans.
But for many blacks, this fight is not a constitutional issue. It is, instead, a civil rights issue.
“The Senate Republican leadership can’t have it both ways. They can’t be the party of Lincoln while driving the Southern strategy’s low-road,” said Wade Henderson, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.
During his 1968 presidential campaign, Richard Nixon used race as a wedge issue to pull Southern states into the Republican column. Ronald Reagan made an even bolder use of the “Southern strategy” when he launched his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., with a speech about states’ rights.
It was in that Mississippi hamlet that three civil rights workers were brutally murdered in 1964 by members of the Ku Klux Klan. States’ rights was the mantra of Klan members and other civil rights opponents.
Just as voting rights for blacks was a pivotal issue of the 1960s civil rights movement, it remains central to the continuing push by blacks for equal rights today. And nothing is more demonstrative of this struggle than the long-running effort to obtain full voting rights in Congress for residents of the nation’s capital.
Hatch and Watts and Huckabee and Steele understand this. I suspect they also understand something even more chilling.
As this nation hurdles toward the day in the not too distant future when minorities are expected to make up a majority of this nation’s population, the Republican Party risks extinction if it persists in behaving like the party of American apartheid.
The fight to win full voting rights for the District of Columbia is not over. And neither is the struggle among Republicans for the soul of their party.
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The Republican Party is struggling and this is not brought to the public’s attention because of this big hype with the primary’s. Their own party just stopped a bill that would give D.C. full voting rights. According to the constitution, which as we know we use in a time of crisis as the decider, Congress has sole power voting over the District of Columbia. The party is destroying itself. The blacks look at this as a civil rights issue. They are trying to go with Lincoln’s policies and bump into the southern strategies still. What the republicans are trying to do is make the public happy and still try to do what’s right. That is why they cross roads with policies.
Well I think that we should go with the “Rule Book”. The republicans don’t have right to stop a bill. It has to be voted on. If they don’t agree with it then the judiciary will check the decision and can veto congress’s decision. We have a republican in power if he doesn’t like what’s going on he also has some power to veto the bill. Both the democrat and republican parties are and war with themselves and destroying themselves.
I have heard the idea of conflict within a party many times. I didn’t know that right now it was going on within the Republican party. The concept of giving the District of Columbia electorial votes seems like a good idea to me. The whole concept of why we fought the civil war seems pertinet here. No Taxation Wtihout Representation seems to work for there argument. So now the argument of wether or not this should happend is tearing the Republicans apart because they have people stongly supporting each side of the arguement. Know the Republicans are devided on what stratagy to use to find a solution while pleasing all of the Republican parties people. They are two road they can take but each one has its downside. But as in all cases when we are in doubt we just wip our the rule book and see how its suppose to be. So I say that we listen to the constituion decide the matter how it says it should be. Because all other time government needs to settle a dispute they use the constitution so we should use it know like all other times.