Republican lawmakers yesterday blocked the Senate from taking up the D.C. vote bill, a potentially fatal setback for the District’s most promising effort in years to get a full member of Congress.
The vote was on a motion to simply consider the bill. Fifty-seven senators voted in favor, three short of the 60 needed to proceed. Without enough support to vault the Senate’s procedural hurdles, the bill is expected to stall this year and possibly next year.
The Senate action was a crushing disappointment to many activists in the decades-long campaign for voting representation in Congress. The bill, which passed the House in April, has gone further than any other D.C. vote measure in almost 30 years.
Yesterday’s vote marked the first time the full Senate had considered the D.C. voting rights issue since 1978, when it passed a constitutional amendment that would have given the city voting representatives in the House and Senate. The amendment died seven years later after getting approval from only 16 of the 38 states required for ratification.
From the Left 
This is such bullshit. If residents of Washington DC are forced to pay Federal taxes, then what you have is taxation without representation and the argument can easily be made that this is wholly unconstitutional. If residents of the District have to voice in the Congress they should be exempt from paying taxes.
Planatation describes living in the District perfectly.
I am a lifelong resident of Washington. In fact, a second generation Washingtonian. My parents always believed they would live to see the day we had a member of the House and the Senate. They died without this happening. What you take for granted when you don’t have it.
Like my parents, I too have come to think I would live long enough to see representation of the more than 500,000 citizens of this complicated city, but I am starting to believe that like my parents, I will go to my grave without realizing what other Americans take for granted.
The irony is, I served my country by enlisting in the Army and going to Viet Nam. I pay taxes. I support the schools. I mow my lawn. But I have no represntative in the Congress.
Isn’t that like the Repugs, doing everything they can to hold back the poor and the left out.
Wft is the problem? (rhetorical question) ..how is it we still call this place a democracy ?
There was a reason the Founding fathers didn’t make Columbia a state.
THINK PEOPLE>>>>>