Because, you know, they didnÂ’t say what he wanted to hear on the issue of representation of the District of Columbia in the House of Representatives.

Justice Department lawyers concluded in an unpublished opinion earlier this year that the historic D.C. voting rights bill pending in Congress is unconstitutional, according to sources briefed on the issue. But Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who supports the measure, ordered up a second opinion from other lawyers in his department and determined that the legislation would pass muster.

* * *

In deciding that the measure is unconstitutional, lawyers in the departmentÂ’s Office of Legal Counsel matched a conclusion reached by their Bush administration counterparts nearly two years ago, when a lawyer there testified that a similar bill would not withstand legal attack.
Holder rejected the advice and sought the opinion of the solicitor generalÂ’s office, where lawyers told him that they could defend the legislation if it were challenged after its enactment.

Quite a different standard between the two positions by the two sets of lawyers. One is examining it from the standard of “is it constitutional?” The other gave an answer based on the standard “is it defensible?” That is a big difference, friends – and that Holder would reject the advice of those he calls the best and the brightest in the Justice Department on the matter is rather telling. Especially since this has been the consistent opinion of the OLC dating back to roughly the Kennedy Administration. After all, the District of Columbia is, self-evidently, not a state, for if it were there would never have been a need to amend the Constitution to grant it electoral votes in a presidential election.

There are three ways to proceed here that are in keeping with the Constitution:

1) Pass an amendment giving the District representation in Congress.

2) Include the population of the District with Maryland for representation purposes, and give it representation in that manner (the territory of the District was granted to the Federal Government by Maryland over two centuries ago).

3) With the approval of Maryland, admit Washington, DC as a state.

And for those who argue that Congress should grant voting representation to the District, IÂ’d like to ask why the same should not be granted to inhabitants of Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, and every other territory in which US citizens are denied the right to vote?

Posted by: Greg at 11:44 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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