Anonymous wrote:Also, you can vote for presidents. Just not congressmen. I've met a few people who say they don't get any vote at all and that's not true.
Sure. We can vote for the president. But we do not have legislative representation. I understand the historical reasons why DC is federal territory rather than a state, but those historical reasons did not include 633,000 people living in that territory. That's 633,000 people who do not have congresspeople they can call when they are concerned about nationwide issues. Their voices are not represented during confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court.
As a former DC government employee, I am not unsympathetic to the argument that DC is bureaucratically ill equipped to be a state and that there are myriad concerns about self-government. I think that it is possible to have those concerns while still believing that from an ethical standpoint, DC's lack of representation in one of the key branches of federal government is problematic.