Steny Hoyer: “this important legislation, the District of Columbia House Voting Rights Act, is designed to do one thing, enfranchise…”

“this important legislation, the District of Columbia House Voting Rights Act, is designed to do one thing, enfranchise Americans fully with a voting representative in the House of Representatives. I have the great honor of representing the great State of Maryland. Maryland, at the request of the Federal Government, gave some square miles of its State to our Federal Government and to the people of America. At that time there were Marylanders living, just a few, but Marylanders living within the confines of what was to become the District of Columbia. Now, this was post-1787, so that the miracle in Philadelphia did not contemplate disenfranchising those voters in the various States, as my friend from Texas mentioned, because the residents that then became, because of the generosity of the State of Maryland, residents of that Federal district, were then residents of the several States. Washington, D.C. is the only capital in a democracy in the world, in the entire world, that does not have a voting representative in its parliament, in the world. Clearly, the successor residents of the District of Columbia succeed residents of the several States. The continued disenfranchisement of more than half a million Americans is unconscionable, is indefensible and wrong.”